Broomfield preps for pro sports: new 6,000-seat arena will host minor-league hockey, hoops.

• Author: Titus, Stephen
• Position: Who owns Colorado

THE BROOMFIELD URBAN RENEWAL Authority (BURA) is building a stadium to host flocks, throngs and swarms of Eagles, Mud Bugs, Scorpions and Killer Bees. Gratefully, we're not talking about flying or crawling pests but AA-league hockey teams. Beneath the sporting veneer of the new Broomfield Event Center's marketing plan is a ground-up development scheme to not only boost revenue for the town of Broomfield, but create demand for other projects in the arena developer's portfolio.

Broomfield's urban renewal operation is working with developers John Frew and Tim Wiens to build the 6,000-seat, 185,000-square-foot stadium that will be a venue not only for hockey, but theater, concerts, graduations and a minor-league basketball franchise that Frew and Wiens are also cultivating.

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"The interest has been very, very strong; people from all over the country have sought us out on this," explained Frew, a principal in Broomfield Ice LLC and Wiens Frew Management Group LLC. It's been a whirlwind process. In the last six weeks I've been interviewing coaches and players. It's like building any business but you have to feed them and house them. We're spending a lot of time learning from other franchises and cities."

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Though he's still learning, Frew is no newcomer to big development deals. He has been involved in most of Denver's biggest projects and sporting events over the past decade, including DIA, Coors Field, The Universal Lending Pavilion, The Denver Grand Prix and as Executive Director of Ski Country USA. Wiens also wields an impressive resume, with a successful Nebraska stadium to his credit. But Broomfield is currently the pair's golden child.

Wiens started out in the town with the 200-acre Park 36 development, renamed Arista, with plans for up to 800,000 square feet of commercial space and 1,200 residential units at the corner of U.S. 36 and 120th Avenue.

"Tim was well on his way to developing Arista. We went to great lengths to keep the arena here, but we fit the Event Center into Arista, not the other way around," Frew said of the mixed-use project. "Even if the Event Center had never come around (Arista) still would have been built out, just maybe not as quickly."

Frew added that they didn't even shop the Event Center idea to any other cities, relying on the strength of their relationship with the City and County of Broomfield, and the obvious benefits enjoyed by Arista, to keep the stadium in the...