Sixth Street Station under town review

“It is unprecedented…”

The largest development ever proposed for modern Crested Butte is officially in the town review process and is expected to be there for many months.

 
The 62,500-square-foot Sixth Street Station is comprised of seven large buildings that will stretch from the land across the street from Gothic Field and Crested Butte Bank to the property across from the Gas Café. The general plan has officially been submitted to the town.
To be located on 20 town lots, there is 25,000 square feet of retail space proposed, three restaurant spaces, 5,000 square feet of office space in the plan, courtyards, an outdoor firepit and close to 30,000 square feet set aside for residential, fractional ownership units in a hotel configuration. The proposal also calls for underground parking and an underground spa facility.
“We started on the idea about two years ago and have not changed a lot from the conversations we’ve had with BOZAR [Board of Zoning and Architectural Review] and the town,” said project architect Gary Hartman of Sunlit Architecture. “We hope there is already a comfort level with the town.”
Crested Butte building and zoning director Bob Gillie said the proposal is something the town hasn’t seen before. “It is no doubt the biggest project to come before the town,” he said. “From a mixed-use standpoint, it is unprecedented. We expect an ongoing dialogue on several different fronts.”
The plan is being processed through the town pipeline as a Planned Unit Development (PUD). The BOZAR is in the second of three phases of review. The conceptual phase has been finished. The general plan will now be reviewed and that includes the site plan, conditional uses, infrastructure review and variances. At the same time, phase three, the building permit review, which includes architectural appropriateness, will be considered.
Gillie said some members of BOZAR and the town staff took a field trip to Telluride last fall “to look at some projects of a larger scale than we normally deal with. We’ve scheduled an extra meeting a month for BOZAR just to deal with this project. We feel like we want this to be available to the public so if people want to know what’s going on, they can attend the meetings.”
Gillie said the town’s plan is to consider one building at a time in the review process.
Hartman said the optimistic goal of the developers is to start construction in late summer of 2009 or early fall. “That of course is dependent on market conditions. Ideally, we want to build the project in one fell swoop,” he said. “But we are studying a phasing option as well.”
Full build-out is expected to take between 18 and 24 months if the entire project is built at once. “We’re currently in discussions with several contracting firms that could handle a project this size,” he said. “In a ski resort, this is a medium-size project but we understand that for Crested Butte, it is a big project.”
Hartman said that given the national economic situation, they have received some favorable responses from contractors in terms of potential timeframe and possible construction bids.
The next BOZAR meeting on the Sixth Street Station plan is scheduled for January 13. Meetings on the project will then be held the second Tuesday of each month.