Grand Junction industrial park targets manufacturers.

• Author: Kretschman, Bob
• Position: COMMERCIAL REAL ESTATE

A 55-acre industrial park under development in Grand Junction is helping the community meet demand for property by manufacturers and similar firms.

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Bookcliff Technology Park, situated on the northern edge of the city less than a mile from Grand Junction Regional Airport, already has dissuaded one manufacturer from leaving and is expected to be the next home of the Western Slope's largest newspaper.

"The leading need for any business in relocation or expansion is a facility, and having land available for our clients is critical," said Ann Driggers, president and chief executive officer of the Grand Junction Economic Partnership, the area's leading economic-development entity.

In recent years, the Grand Junction area's available supply of industrial-zoned land dwindled as energy-related firms moved in to support natural gas drilling in the region. Land prices increased significantly, and properties large enough to suit expanding firms were hard to find.

Enter Industrial Developments Inc., a 50-year-old organization affiliated with the Grand Junction Area Chamber of Commerce. IDI's main purpose is to acquire, hold and develop land to support businesses, and it had owned the cow pasture that would become Bookcliff Technology Park for more than a decade, said Diane Schwenke, IDI's administrator and the chamber's president and CEO.

"We always envisioned it as a high-end business park," Schwenke said. However, the site's development potential was hobbled by a lack of water, sewer and other infrastructure.

As pressure mounted for the availability of more industrial land, Bookcliff Technology Park attracted increasing attention. Eventually, Cox Newspapers, the Atlanta-based parent company of The Daily Sentinel, committed to buy 12 acres in the park and also helped IDI pay for installation of infrastructure at the site, Schwenke said. The newspaper plans to construct a new $35 million, 80,000-square-foot office, printing and production facility there to replace its aging building in downtown Grand Junction.

About the same time, Grand Junction-based Leitner-Poma of America was searching for a site to build a state-of-the-art facility to manufacture ski lifts and snow-grooming equipment. Leitner-Poma has been in Grand Junction since 1981, building ski-lift...