April 7, 2004 New York Times

In coming years, however, visitors may get a different introduction to Denver, as a master-planned
community, HighPointe at DIA, rises on 1,800 acres of farmland near the airport.
The HighPointe project, which has an estimated price tag of $1.5 billion over 20 years, straddles two
cities - Denver (population 550,000) and Aurora (276,000) - that once competed for sales-tax-generating
development, a crucial source of revenue for Colorado cities.
But in this case, the two mayors, John W. Hickenlooper of Denver and Ed Tauer of Aurora - both in office
less than a year - have agreed not only to share sales and lodging tax revenue from the project but also
to work together on planning, development and permitting as well as decisions about allocating services.
The mayors say they are trying to establish a model for regional cooperation in a seven-county
metropolitan area where more than three-quarters of the population lives outside Denver.
Mayor Hickenlooper, a geologist turned restaurateur, became prominent in Denver by opening the
Wynkoop Brewpub in 1988 in a historic but neglected section of downtown, spurring the redevelopment of
what is now the trendy LoDo (as in lower downtown) district. "In business," said Mr. Hickenlooper, who
helped redevelop several century-old LoDo buildings, including Mercantile Square, a mixed-use project
that houses a branch of the famous Tattered Cover Book Store, "there are laws against monopolies. In
the public sector, we don't have laws like that. We have an obligation to work together and see where our
interests are aligned."
Like Denver and Aurora, other cities across the country are also finding it a wiser strategy to join forces
with their neighbors rather than fight with them over a slice of tax revenue, said William H. Hudnut III, a
senior resident fellow at the Urban Land Institute. In the Boston area, for example, the mayors of Everett,
Malden and Medford formed a commission to oversee the development of a high-tech park along the
Malden River. "Mayors are becoming more savvy," said Mr. Hudnut, a former mayor of Indianapolis.
"They realize that if they don't cooperate, business will go elsewhere."
HighPointe is not an unprecedented example of cooperation between Denver and Aurora. The two
previous mayors, Wellington Webb of Denver and Paul Tauer of Aurora, the father of the current mayor,
overcame a chilly relationship to cooperate in the early 1990's on a reuse plan for the former Lowry Air
Force Base, about 15 miles east of downtown Denver, and establish the Lowry Redevelopment Authority,
with equal representation from each city. Its mission is to create a mixed-use community for the 1,866-
acre site, including 4,000 new homes and apartments, a town center with small stores and 1.8 million
square feet of office space.
Lowry, about 70 percent complete, is scheduled to be finished by 2007, said Hilarie Portell, a
spokeswoman for the redevelopment authority. "We feel that Lowry's success was built on this foundation
between Denver and Aurora and extensive public involvement," she said.
By including revenue sharing - the details of that have yet to be worked out - and a uniform permitting
process, the two cities' HighPointe agreement goes further than their accord on Lowry, however. More
than a year before any construction is scheduled to begin, a task force has been appointed to resolve
issues relating to public safety, zoning, utilities and roads and permits.
The objective, Mr. Tauer said, is to present the developer, the Landmark Properties Group of Littleton,
Colo., with a uniform set of requirements. "We want to make it look as much as possible like you're
submitting it to one city," he said. As for services, he said it would not make sense for "a snowplow to
drive up the Aurora part of a street and then stop."
The HighPointe site has about 1,200 acres in Aurora and 600 in Denver, with both the Denver skyline and
the snow-capped Front Range mountains as a backdrop. Landmark, founded by Ray C. Pittman, a former
senior vice president of Catellus, the national land, office and warehouse developer based in San
Francisco, is buying the bulk of the acreage from the Van Schaak family, a partner in Box Elder Farms,
which supplied about 40 percent of the land for the airport.
The ultimate plan calls for as much as 10 million square feet of prime office space, a million square feet of
retail space, a 27-hole golf course and 3,000 homes of differing prices. The first phase, expected to begin
next year, will include roads, built at Landmark's expense; a 350-room hotel; and a nine-hole golf course,
said Mr. Pittman, who developed 2.2 million square feet of distribution space at the 295-acre Stapleton
Business Center, part of the widely praised redevelopment of Denver's former airport.
Aside from Lowry and Stapleton, there is another redevelopment project near the airport: a $4.3 billion,
square-mile bioscience park that is being developed around the former Fitzsimons Army Medical Center
in Aurora.
The impetus for HighPointe is Aurora's desire for more top-level office space that could attract highpaying
jobs, said Wendy Mitchell, the president of the Aurora Economic Development Council, a publicprivate
nonprofit organization.
Under the plans, 913 acres, an unusually high proportion, is for commercial space, although several real
estate specialists said that the office buildings were not likely to go up anytime soon. At the end of the
year, the Denver area had an overall office vacancy rate of 20 percent, while in Aurora and the
surrounding northeast section it was 15 percent, according to figures compiled by Cushman & Wakefield.
Todd M. Wheeler, a senior director at Cushman & Wakefield, said the market might not support office
development at the HighPointe site for five years or more. "There's no question," he said, "that over some
time horizon it's clearly going to be a great location."
On a tour of the area surrounding the HighPointe site, Mr. Pittman was critical of the tract housing that
has been built there since the airport opened in 1995 - rows and rows of houses and lawns of identical
size, with the same facades. By contrast, he said, Landmark intends to follow "smart growth" principles
with housing of diverse architectural styles catering to different segments of the market, a town center
with neighborhood shops, open space, walking trails and bike paths.
Mr. Pittman and the two mayors say they hope that eventually there will be a stop at HighPointe on a new
rail line from the airport to downtown Denver. But whether the line is built will depend on whether a $4.7
billion transportation initiative gets on the November ballot and is approved. The construction would be
financed by federal grants and an increase in the Regional Transportation District sales tax from 0.6
percent to 1 percent.
Mr. Tauer said the transit expansion was not critical to the project because it offered several other
transportation advantages: it is next to a major airport; is bisected by E-470, a new segment of the
beltway; and is four and a half miles from Interstate 70.
But Will Coyne, the land-use advocate for Environment Colorado, a nonprofit organization in Denver, said
the amount of office space planned for HighPointe would equal nearly half of the downtown Denver office
market. "The transportation piece is incredibly important," he said. "This is a huge amount of commercial
space outside the city. If we can't connect it by rail, and make it accessible, then there will be massive
transportation implications."
But Mr. Coyne praised "the step forward in regional cooperation" by Aurora and Denver. "If we can find a
way to eradicate this competition between entities," he said, "we can move toward good planned
development.”