Fort Collins vs. Timnath

TIMNATH — About five seconds after crossing Interstate 25, driving east on Harmony Road, things start to feel different. There’s a Wal-Mart Supercenter going up, for one thing, which is the first clue that we’re not in Fort Collins anymore, Dorothy.

After another 30 seconds, there’s a field used not for bike trails and pretty views but for the more utilitarian, old-fashioned purpose of growing crops.

Another two minutes’ drive east is what can be considered New Timnath, a community on the verge of exploding with massive semi-custom homes, a new golf course and a much different lifestyle than the one the town’s 200-some residents are accustomed to.

And it’s miles away from Fort Collins, if only figuratively.

If municipalities could have duels, Fort Collins and Timnath might have been meeting at high noon today in Old Town Square. But as it is, Fort Collins officials can only ask Timnath not to make like Nathan Meeker and go West.

Fort Collins city leaders plan to be in town Wednesday night to plead with Timnath leaders not to agree to annex a chunk of land west of Interstate 25, just outside the city’s eastern edge.

City planners, the city manager and the mayor and council say if Timnath annexes the land—owned by developer Jay Stoner, who envisions a grand European-style canal snaking through a new urban community—Fort Collins will suffer a major blow. At this point, nothing will prevent that except the good will of Timnath’s town board, which has no other reason not to welcome Stoner with open arms.

City leaders are using words like “frustrated,” “absurd” and “shocked” to describe how they feel about the west side of I-25 becoming part of Timnath. The city is poised to lose control of its main southern gateway, not only in terms of tax dollars but in its sheer look and feel.

“How would you like this—you turn off the highway and go west, and it says ‘Welcome to Timnath’?” Mayor Doug Hutchinson said. “It’s a very, very significant long-term impact to the city of Fort Collins, what’s happening along there.”

Joe Frank, Fort Collins director of advance planning, put it simply: “It’s a very big deal,” he said.

Timnath officials are keeping their own town in mind, said spokesman Kyle Boyd.

“Timnath is doing what Timnath feels is in our best interest. We’re looking at our own area,” he said.

Several factors are adding up this perfect storm, including the fact that Timnath wants to grow. But where to lay the blame, so to speak, is a more complicated matter.



Jay Stoner was pleased last fall to talk about his planned Riverwalk community along Harmony and I-25.

At an open house at Fossil Ridge High School, Stoner and city planners Joe Frank and Clark Mapes talked for three hours about the development, which would be built in a 305-acre space that now consists of old gravel pits filled with water.

The ambitious development would include an upscale health and nutrition center, high-rise urban housing, mass transit and a Grand Canal-style waterway with gondolas and canoes. City planning staff worked with Stoner to propose updates to the Harmony corridor plan, last updated in 1991, and ensure the development met Fort Collins’ standards. Stoner said he dreamed of improving the main entrance to his hometown by building the world-class development.

But in the past seven months, something slowly changed. Stoner watched as Fort Collins City Council balked at proposed interchange improvements at I-25 and Colo. 392, the city’s southern gateway and the primary gateway for Windsor. He watched as the council rejected a plan to re-zone a chunk of land at I-25 and Prospect Road for commercial use, preferring to keep it in its current industrial plan. And he realized his European-style development might not fly.

“We asked Fort Collins for close to a year or more, and we didn’t get the indication that it would be approved in Fort Collins,” he said. “So we have more opportunity to do a better project by going to Timnath.”

He said the council’s decision not to re-zone Prospect played a part in his decision, though it wasn’t the only impetus.

“It’s pretty clear if you watch the city council of Fort Collins, their current mix of 4-3 is not particularly growth-friendly,” he said. “They did what they did at Prospect and I-25, that’s another piece, but that in itself probably wouldn’t have done it. I think it’s a philosophical thing.”

A property owner on the eastern side of Prospect and I-25 had wanted the council to change the land use plan for his 86-acre property so a commercial development could be built. But in April, a divided council rejected the proposal on a 4-3 vote.

City Councilman Wade Troxell, who voted for it, said he thinks Stoner was committed to Fort Collins at first.

“But the straw that broke the camel’s back was to see how the property owner at Prospect and I-25 was voted against after 14 months of concerted effort and expense on behalf of the property owner and the city. It was the result of what I believe was arbitrary decision-making at the city council level,” he said. “I think it only serves notice to anyone serious about a quality project: why bother with the city of Fort Collins?”

City Councilman Diggs Brown also voted for the Prospect rezoning and said altering the city’s interchange plans to allow development would still keep the city’s open spaces and community separator zones intact. But it would let the city dictate what gets built at its gateways, not another town like Timnath.

“It’s imperative that the city of Fort Collins controls its gateways, while reaping the benefits of use tax and sales tax revenue to sustain our local economy,” he said.

City Council members David Roy, Ben Manvel, Lisa Poppaw and Kelly Ohlson were not reachable for this article; Ohlson did not return repeated phone calls from FC Now.

In previous interviews in local media, Manvel has said the Prospect decision was not intended to send any signal other than that the council did not agree with that particular proposal. But others see it as a keystone decision.

“The I-25- Prospect decision, to not even take that first step of rezoning, it was a 4-3 thing and I think the council sent a strong signal that they did not support development, and I think that’s colored this whole issue for the Harmony gateway,” Hutchinson said. “Gosh, it’s our gateway, and I’m very disappointed that this may be happening in Timnath and not Fort Collins.”

Hutchinson offered to hold a meeting so Stoner could explain his proposal to the council, but he declined. Hutchinson said he was disappointed because council had not seen any formal description of the project.

Members of city staff were intimately involved, however, and they are just as frustrated as the elected officials. Joe Frank and Clark Mapes, who lived and breathed the Harmony Corridor amendment for the past year, said several months of work is now on hold.

“We were going to be able to pull together a very nice document that I think had a very good chance of being well-received by city council, before Stoner got cold feet and is now at least investigating going to Timnath,” Frank said. “We’ve had a plan for nearly something like 18-20 years for the Harmony corridor. It’s probably the most important gateway to Fort Collins, and this property is probably the most important parcel of land in that gateway.”

He still hopes Stoner comes back to the table, he said.

City Manager Darin Atteberry said if Timnath moves forward with Stoner, more Draconian measures might be called for.

“If that’s the direction they’re headed, we will do everything we can to prevent that from happening,” he said.



Things between Timnath and Fort Collins were mostly calm for the 28 years Fort Collins has had a growth management area.

The first real signs of friction came in 2004, when Timnath annexed enough farm land to increase its size by a factor of 10. Raised eyebrows turned to raised hackles after the town declared all of that newly annexed land to be “blighted,” which allowed Timnath to keep sales and property taxes that would otherwise go to a variety of governmental entities and use the revenue for infrastructure improvements.

Also in 2004, Fort Collins updated its city plan, and council held an extensive discussion about whether to extend the growth management area, or GMA, east of I-25 north of Prospect. For various reasons, including sprawl prevention, land preservation and urban regeneration, the answer was no.

“No one ever considered, ‘If we don’t do this, Timnath will do it.’ The question was, is it city or will it remain county?” Mapes said. “The public interest in limiting sprawl and keeping Fort Collins compact, and having a county setting for the towns, is the view that prevailed in a very pointed discussion.”

Two years later, however, Timnath sent a memo, now infamous in the city planning department.

The document notified Fort Collins officials that Timnath planned to change its own comprehensive plan, which would have included a chunk of land west of Harmony—the area now under fire, already inside Fort Collins’ growth management area—and have it be a regional, commercial and industrial center. The town’s growth area marched as far north as the Anheuser-Busch plant, including the areas east of I-25 that Fort Collins had considered only two years before.

To some in Fort Collins, the move negated the purpose of land-use planning, wherein adjoining communities respect each other’s current and future boundaries.

Some in the planning department were so caught off guard that they wondered if it was a mistake.

Atteberry raised several concerns about the plan, and Timnath withdrew that section. But it was like a warning shot fired across I-25, and Fort Collins has been worried ever since. Stoner’s decision to take his project to Timnath almost seems like a natural progression.

It doesn’t to Mapes, however, who said it was “out of the blue.”

“When (the GMA) was first created in 1980, Fort Collins respected Timnath’s comment at that time to stay west of I-25, and ever since then Fort Collins has respected their stated desire not to merge, or blend, or swallow the town of Timnath, by having planning that emphasized the flood plain and separation from Timnath,” Mapes said.

Fort Collins did absorb some land east of I-25, at Prospect and at Mulberry Street, but Mapes said that was consistent with Fort Collins’ future growth and was not about undermining Timnath.

“There was zero impact on Timnath with those little pieces that are on the east side of I-25. They were not done at the expense of Timnath,” Mapes said. “Going across Harmony is absolutely and radically at the expense of Fort Collins.”



Timnath, of course, has a different view.

The town’s comprehensive plan, last updated a year ago, says residents surveyed in 1996 “clearly indicated that citizens did not want the town to grow or change.” But two years later, a survey of land owners showed that almost half of them wanted to develop their land within the next five years. Growth has followed in spurts.

Timnath officials seem concerned about the light the Riverwalk issue will cast on their town. Calls for the town planner and town administrator were returned by Timnath’s public information officer, a soft-spoken man named Kyle Boyd who joined the staff in December.

Boyd noted that the town’s intergovernmental agreement with Larimer County is on hold, partly because Fort Collins balked at Timnath’s growth management area map. The county won’t approve a land-use plan to which a neighboring municipality objects.

Because that’s on hold, Timnath is not bound by any agreement that would prevent it from annexing Stoner’s property. The town council is meeting with Stoner Wednesday night to discuss a pre-annexation agreement—what Boyd and Stoner separately described as akin to a pre-nuptial agreement—which would allow the town and Stoner to proceed before the land is formally annexed.

“Our perspective is, Stoner came to us, we reviewed it, we thought it was a valid proposal, so now it’s at council,” Boyd said. “What we’re trying to do is create Timnath, bring together the old and the new.”

Boyd said he did not view Fort Collins’ frustrations as a feud between the two towns.

“We’re trying to work regionally with them, work cooperatively with them,” he said, adding that staffers from both municipalities have continued meeting about the town’s growth management area.

He also added that different towns have different priorities.

“Timnath is different from Fort Collins. We’re not Fort Collins over here.”

Troxell described the situation as a missed opportunity for Fort Collins.

“This council doesn’t know how to work regionally. Whichever neighboring communitiy it is will be a challenge until we can recognize the fact that we are simply not an island,” he said. “It’s absurd that we’re at this point, not recognizing the fact that the interchanges will be developed. And as much as some on council would like to hold their breath, and not recognize the fact that the world arlund us is changing, it will be to the detriment of Fort Collins.”

Stoner said it’s not personal.

“My attitude is, I’m very excited, I think this Riverwalk development is going to be a great project and we’re looking forward to further discussion now with Timnath. It’s nothing against Fort Collins—you just can’t make everybody happy,” he said. “Philosophically, I think we are more aligned with Timnath, and that’s why we’re going that direction.”