Englewood will be asking voters for approval of a land swap with Shea Properties in Highlands Ranch that would eventually allow the city to lease the land it gets in the swap to developers.
Leasing the land could mean the city brings in hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue from future development, said Englewood Mayor Randy Penn.
Englewood owns 12.3 acres in Highlands Ranch fronting Lucent Boulevard, between Plaza Drive and Town Center Drive.
The city wants to swap that with a parcel of equal size that is about a quarter-mile to the southwest, closer to Town Center Drive. That parcel is owned by Shea Properties, the primary developer in Highlands Ranch.
Shea already owns land to the north of Englewood’s property; a swap would allow for contiguous development.
The Englewood property needs to be leveled and doesn’t serve the city’s purposes, but it would work for Shea.
“There’s really not a negative, because most people don’t know — unfortunately — that we even own that land out there,” Penn said. “This just gives us an opportunity to increase our ability to have more development and development sooner on these properties than later.”
Penn said most likely the swapped land would be developed for retail or office, not residential.
Currently the city leases out three pieces of property at Lucent Boulevard and C-470 to the Ben Franklin Academy charter school, and to the Mike Ward Infiniti and Larry Miller Nissan car dealerships. Penn said those leases bring about $700,000 of income every year and the leases are for 75 years.
Englewood came to own land in Douglas County when it established the Englewood/McLellan Reservoir Foundation in 1999, to protect the watershed of the reservoir that had been built in the 1950s. The reservoir runs along County Line Road east of South Santa Fe Drive to the Highline Canal.
Penn said council is determined not to sell the Highlands Ranch parcel, because the city can make more money leasing the property.
“We want to have that continual cash flow coming into the city of Englewood, and, at the end of the leases, the city of Englewood still has the land,” Penn said.
Englewood Deputy City Manager Mike Flaherty said that while it’s not a sale of the land, the city attorney has deemed the land swap is tantamount to a sale and needs to be approved by voters.
Peter Culshaw, executive vice president of Shea Properties, explained the proposal this way:
“Everyone gets kind of a better configuration of land and, frankly, a more useful parcel, and it matches where the roads are going to go in the future so we’re not chopping off a piece of perfectly good land with a road through the middle,” he said. “It’s just a very logical thing to do.”
Clayton Woullard: 303-954-2953, cwoullard@denverpost.com or twitter.com/yhclayton
