What developments, improvements are in Colorado Avenue’s future?

“It starts to feel more like a downtown where there’s lots of different interesting places,” said DDA Executive Director Brandon Stam. “If you look at Colorado Avenue, a lot of the businesses and developments that have popped up there have a different kind of character than the stuff on Main Street, such as Ramblebine and the Melrose Hotel and Cruise Control. In my mind, it’s kind of tying those two streets together so it feels more vibrant.”

Mayor Anna Stout praised the collaborative process over the past five years that has given the city more of a focus on how to make sure the downtown feel doesn’t only apply to Main Street.

“When we engage our community to come up with those plans, what we see is this flourishing we’re seeing downtown not just on our Main Street but south of Main Street, and even north of Main Street,” Stout said. “We’re seeing this expansion from the Main Street core to the neighboring areas, and that’s creating even more of an attractive place to visit and live and spend time. It all contributes to quality of life, which has been one of the city council’s strategic priorities for years.”

Looking to Colorado Avenue’s future, there are priorities for the city, the DDA and BID to tackle in order to achieve an ideally activated area, especially as long-term projects like the Terminal are looming.

AREAS FOR IMPROVEMENT

While some businesses have seen success on Colorado Avenue and other businesses have opened to enthusiastic clientele, problems persist for some businesses and for the street as a whole.

The Barn Boutique relocated from Fruita to 441 Colorado Ave. last year, where business has declined. No increase in foot traffic has manifested from the relocation as hoped.

“We’re not sure if it’s just because a lot of our customer base is in Fruita, because we do a lot of it online too, or because people didn’t want to come in the storefronts on Colorado Avenue,” said Brooke Brennan, a manager and employee at the Barn Boutique. “After communicating with some other owners as well, our business owner had discovered that a lot of places are struggling to get people in the door and have them stay in the door.”

Brennan did add that the store is hopeful that, with the summer and its warm weather, activity along Colorado Avenue will increase.

The Zesty Moose also doesn’t see much walk-in traffic from the crowds frequenting Ramblebine Brewing Company or other drinking places. Most of the Zesty Moose’s business is done online — the company started as an exclusively online business in 2007 and has been such for most of its history — and it does have loyal in-person customers, but the store’s focus on wine and its proximity to some empty storefronts have both limited the store’s appeal to people who are simply walking by.

“Ramblebine is doing really well. They’re busy. But that’s not really my demographic,” said Zesty Moose CEO and Founder Diana Tap. “We’ve found that people who drank beer don’t come in and support us. We have a winery in there, also, but they’re not wine drinkers. We’re not getting any foot traffic from Ramblebine being there. I haven’t noticed any increase on Colorado Avenue…. My demographic is certainly not the younger crowd at all. It’s the older people that have money that are retired and enjoy a good glass of a traditional wine.”

EMPTY SPACES

As Tap herself noted when talking to The Daily Sentinel, there are several empty storefronts along Colorado Avenue, such as the spaces once belonging to Loki Outdoor Shop, which moved to Main Street, and Mutual Friends. These empty storefronts can play a role in active businesses near them seeing underwhelming visitation.

City leaders have touted the communications in the process of building a more active Colorado Avenue. Tap thinks there’s room for improvement on the communication front.

“I think Colorado Avenue has a lot of potential,” Tap said. “I think it’s important that the DDA and the City of Grand Junction can do better in communicating with downtown businesses. We all need to work together to keep downtown vibrant and appealing to attract people who visit.”

When asked about these vacant spaces, Stam said the DDA has encouraged grants for prospective business owners as incentives for them to move downtown, such as restaurant conversion and expansion grants.

“I think part of the challenge is some of the vacant spaces on Colorado Avenue need investment,” Stam said. “Some of those spaces are industrial and maybe it costs money to bring those up to code for a newer use, so that’s been our strategy: how do we incentivize some of those redevelopment opportunities. We bought the old Greyhound (station) with the intent to redevelop that space.”

LONG-TERM OUTLOOK

That old Greyhound station between Colorado and Ute avenues is set to become the Terminal in the coming years. The Terminal will be a 100,000-square-foot, six-story, mixed-use and mixed-income complex with 90-100 residential units, art galleries and studios, and “high craftsmanship” food and beverage options.

A Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT) mobility hub as well as a renovated Union Station Train Depot will also join the fabric of downtown Grand Junction in the coming years. Each of these projects should have an impact on Colorado Avenue and its businesses, although what that impact could look like remains uncertain.

“There’s no question that there are a lot of areas south of Main Street and south of Colorado now with all the activation that’s started to take place that are blighted,” Stout said. “When you start to activate those areas and you start drawing people there for cool things like a really cool Union Station or a neat Space to Create project or bringing people directly through a mobility hub, what you do is you start activating that whole area, and then you start seeing the domino effect in development. That leads to jobs, that leads to more opportunities for development in general, and that’s where you see entrepreneurs come take root.

”When we have this broader community vision for what this area of our community looks like, that allows individual dreams to take root, as well.”

Another wild card in Colorado Avenue’s future, and downtown Grand Junction’s in general, is the fate of the former Wells Fargo property at the corner of Main and Fourth streets: a large and vacant space that also includes one of downtown Grand Junction’s largest — and, to many, most convenient — parking lots.

Stout said this building wasn’t being occupied by a “sticky establishment” because it didn’t serve a purpose that kept people downtown. She also said most people can do their banking on the go, and because the space was being used for a bank, it led to a stretch of Main Street that should have been occupied by storefronts instead being occupied by brick walls.

“Certainly, our hope is that it will be something that further activates downtown. That property, as it stood, was not being utilized to its highest and best use as a bank,” she said. “When you think about your downtown, those storefronts are really meant to spur economic activity, whether that’s bringing people to restaurants or for retail or for activities. That’s the idea behind main streets: as a gathering place for people to come together for experiences. When you think about how large that footprint is, it’s a major contributor to the downtown TIF (tax increment financing), and those TIF dollars are re-invested back into downtown through the BID and the DDA.”

The property has a prospective buyer, although there are no further details available about the buyer at this time. The City of Grand Junction didn’t buy the property because there would no longer be any property tax dollars from the site going into the downtown TIF.

Stam said the parking lot behind the building could potentially be the subject of a shared-use agreement with the new tenant. He added that planned improvements to Fourth and Fifth streets will help the Colorado Avenue area feel “more pedestrian and multi-modal.”

“Parking on Colorado is a bit of a double-edged sword because it actually kind of hurts some of the business activity on Colorado,” Stam said. “It’s more beneficial for Main Street. Ideally, in the future, there would probably be another structured parking solution somewhere that can serve multiple uses.”