BROOMFIELD — If the relationship between city officials and the developers tasked with building Broomfield Town Square is kind of like a marriage — a description used multiple times Tuesday during a nearly six-hour public hearing on the project — this roughly decade-long coupling appears to have hit a rocky patch.
The development team led by City Street Investors’ Joe Vostrejs and Outpost Partners’ Tim Fredregill is requesting an 18-month extension for its building permits. This request was the formal reason for this week’s Broomfield City Council study session, but the occasionally testy hearing felt at times like an airing of grievances and at others like a cross-examination.
The BTS project would wrap around the former Safeway, which closed in 2014 and could be repurposed into a market/food hall concept, and aims to transform nearly 40 acres north of West 120th Avenue and east of Main Street into a community gathering place with hundreds of new residences, tens of thousands of square feet of commercial space, restaurants and shops surrounding a publicly accessible (and potentially swimmable) lake.
The vision behind Broomfield Town Square is to create a downtown neighborhood in a city that’s never really had such a district.
Vostrejs, whose resume includes Denver’s Union Station and Hangar 2 mixed-use developments, was initially recruited by Broomfield leaders to draft a plan for a downtown center. Rather than passing along the plan to another developer to bring the plan to life, city officials chose in 2019 to offer Vostrejs the opportunity to build Broomfield Town Square himself, and the parties inked a development agreement.
That agreement sets forth Broomfield’s public investment in the project at an estimated value of $74 million, city documents show.
Speaking over Zoom from an overseas trip, Vostrejs said that he has “given an enormous part of the last 10 years of my life to this project and still believe deeply that Broomfield is going to get its downtown.”
Having received site-plan approval from the Broomfield City Council in 2023, the development team must pull building permits by Sept. 12 (three years after approval) or face the possibility of having those approvals revoked.
The developers say that they expected a horizontal infrastructure plan — which included two small buildings — that they submitted to the city in March to meet their three-year deadline to pull permits. Broomfield staffers disagree, claiming that merely submitting a plan for infrastructure and two ancillary structures doesn’t represent significant momentum for a project that was approved in 2023.
Broomfield leaders also have taken issue with changes to the project’s completion timeline — the developers say that if they’re given the permit extension, they can likely deliver the project by late 2029, several years after previous projections — and question BTS’ financial viability.
“The question before council is not whether the community wants this project to succeed,” Broomfield city manager Jennifer Hoffman said. “It’s whether the project, as currently structured, demonstrates the readiness and financial clarity to justify additional time.”
During a public comment session Tuesday, many of the speakers stressed the importance of seeing the Broomfield Town Square project through to completion.
“Broomfield is a great place to live, but it has lacked a true community center. … This is not just another development,” public commenter Sandy Anderson said. “It is a defining investment into the future, identity and livability of our city. Delaying or jeopardizing this project over timing would be a mistake.”
Vostrejs has blamed Broomfield staff’s interpretation about what progress ought to be considered significant enough to pull permits, saying Tuesday that those decisions “stopped the project cold” when bond underwriters and investors got spooked about BTS’ potential lack of entitlements.
“This has been a painfully slow process,” said Fredregill, who was present for Tuesday’s meeting and fielded most of the questions from city leaders. But when pressed by City Council, he declined to place the blame for delays since 2023 at the feet of Broomfield staffers.
However, Vostrejs was quoted in a recent BusinessDen story saying, “It just seems like the city manager, under her leadership, is doing her damnedest to throw up roadblocks to this project, and we don’t understand it.”
This type of rhetoric appeared to rankle some Broomfield leaders, and Vostrejs’ opening comments at Tuesday’s hearing seemed to achieve little in the way of damage control.
“The city created this moment, and we’re here because of it,” he said.
“If this project does not move forward, what’s the city’s plan?” Vostrejs asked, noting that his agreement with the city grants his team exclusive rights to develop the property through 2044. “The city can’t sell the land, it can’t bring in another developer, it can’t build something else.”
Council members called Vostrejs’ remarks “shocking,” “arrogant,” “condescending” and “troubling,” while Broomfield staff noted that if a permit extension is provided, the city could potentially renegotiate other aspects of the agreement.
“I like this project. I’ve been excited about this project for a very long time. I’m the last person looking for a reason this won’t work,” Broomfield City Councilmember Julie Twiss told Fredregill. “You’re making it hard. There are significant issues with this project, and they are not being addressed.”
Beyond the permit deadline, Broomfield officials raised concerns about the reliability of the developer’s financial models, lack of on-site affordable housing and whether Vostrejs’ team was prioritizing other projects over BTS.
“There’s no gamesmanship happening here, and it’s unfortunate that we’ve lost your faith and confidence,” Fredregill said.
The development team is “trying to build this thing. I’m not sure why there is distrust in that concept,” he said, adding that the group has put in $1 million worth of billable hours working on the BTS over the years. “The attacks I take personally: ‘What are you doing? You guys aren’t working on this.’”
Broomfield officials, some of whom speculated that the developer’s presentation for Tuesday was thrown together at the last minute, requested more specific and detailed information addressing their concerns in advance of a May 12 meeting when the City Council is scheduled to vote on the permit-extension request.
Despite their disagreements, representatives of both sides of the dispute said it’s nothing personal.
“Is this situation resolvable from just an interpersonal dynamics (perspective)? Absolutely, in my opinion,” Fredregill said.
Having tough conversations is “important in relationships,” Mayor Guyleen Castriotta said. “I consider it group therapy.”
