New project is on the table for Carbondale site
Post Independent
Aspen, CO Colorado
CARBONDALE – The same partnership that proposed the ill-fated Village at Crystal River has put together a new, much smaller proposal for the property at the northwest corner of Main and Highway 133.
The four-member partnership behind the project has scheduled an introductory meeting from 4-6 p.m. on Thursday, Nov. 15, at the Gordon Cooper Library in Carbondale.
The new project is being called Main Street Market, and would occupy about eight acres, or one third of the 24-acre parcel that has been the focus of more than a decade of development attempts.
The new proposal calls for the relocation of City Market from its current space at the southwest corner of Main Street and Highway 133, to a larger building on the north side of Main Street and behind the existing 7-Eleven store.
Beyond a new City Market store, there would be three building sites of about an acre each fronting Main Street to the west of the Highway 133 intersection.
And, as planning consultant Bob Schultz put it in a phone interview on Friday, “That’s it.”
The remaining 16 acres, he said, “will remain undeveloped, for now.”
Schultz said the plans for the project all meet the underlying zoning for the area, which should entail a less extensive review process and eliminate the possibility of a voter referendum about its fate.
Two previous development plans – for the Village at Crystal River earlier this year and the Crystal River Marketplace about eight years ago – were rejected by voters in special elections.
Only two of the four partners behind the new project are being publicly named at this point, said one of the partners, local developer Briston Peterson.
“It’s the same partnership,” he said, of himself, former Village lead developer Rich Schierburg of the Peregrine Group development company in Wheat Ridge, and two others whom Peterson declined to identify.
“This is really a project that’s owned by locals,” Peterson said, though he conceded that Schierburg is from the Front Range.
Peterson said he has 20 years of development experience in the Roaring Fork Valley. With the two unidentified partners in the mix, he said, “The development team has a strong presence in the Roaring Fork Valley.”
Still, he said of the two unnamed partners, “They’d rather stay below the radar. I’m going to be the face of the project.”
