By Tom Hacker For The Times-Call
LOVELAND -- Plans for the Aerospace Clean Energy Manufacturing and Innovation Park (ACE) remain on track despite Monday's exit of the lead developer, city officials and project backers say. Minneapolis-based United Properties, which partnered on the ACE project with the Colorado Association for Manufacturing and Technology (CAMT), abruptly ended its negotiations with the city to buy the Agilent Technologies Inc. campus where the technology manufacturing park is taking shape.
"It is going to go forward, and it's going to explode," CAMT chief executive Elaine Thorndike said following the United Properties announcement. "The things that are crucial -- the interest from companies and our own initiatives -- are going better than we ever could have imagined," she said. "There are so many exciting things going on that we're not discouraged by this."
Thorndike and Loveland officials said within hours of the United Properties announcement that they had scheduled meetings with other developers -- including Northern Colorado companies McWhinney, Loveland Commercial, and Neenan Co. -- to fill the void left by the Minneapolis company.
7,000 potential jobs
Thorndike also said her agency, along with NASA and the Golden-based National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), are in talks with scores of manufacturing companies that are interested in locating at the ACE park.
Project organizers say they plan to have as many as 100 companies, employing up to 7,000 people, engaged in turning NASA and NREL technology patents into products, getting them to market on a fast-track schedule.
United Properties president Frank Dutke said Monday that interest from large, national companies was insufficient to continue with the project. "It has always been our view that this not be a speculative project, and that there be users identified before we begin the redevelopment there," Dutke said. "We believe that in order to finance a multistory, multitenant industrial project that there must be at least some national companies on the rent roll."
CAMT and United Properties announced their partnership, and Loveland's choice as the ACE location, on June 21. United Properties then entered into an exclusive, 60-day negotiating process with the city to buy the 812,000 square feet of buildings and 130 acres of developable land at Agilent.
'Very good tenants'
City Manager Bill Cahill said he thought the decision by United Properties to pull out of the project was driven by the company's business plan. "I think UP had a business model that called for a certain proportion of the buildings to be filled by credit tenants by a certain date," Cahill said.
"A lot of the companies that have expressed interest in the project are very good tenants but do not fill the credit-tenant requirements." Credit tenants, in commercial real estate parlance, are large, national companies whose resources guarantee fulfillment of long-term leases, and whose presence would help secure favorable project finance terms.
City and CAMT officials will meet this week with four developers that Loveland officials had earlier identified as top prospects for the job of developing the ACE project. McWhinney, Loveland Commercial LLC and Fort Collins-based Neenan Co. all responded to the city's request for proposals on the project in February. The fourth is Richmond, Calif.-based Orton Development Inc.
Discussions with developer prospects likely will be the topic of a special closed-door meeting of the Loveland City Council that will convene tonight.
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