Who owns colorado? grand junction.

• Author: TITUS, STEPHEN

Unlike many Colorado cities, it's hard to label only one part of Grand Junction as a growth center. Even city planners look at a map, shrug their shoulders and point out a few projects, all fewer than 500 acres, as the area's most significant.

But in terms of trends, city and county officials call Grand Junction's downtown the most exciting thanks to a number of projects underway or planned.

"It is turning around," said Charles Rose, project coordinator for Mesa County. "I think the magnet that's going to help that is the Justice Center. I think it will start a renaissance on this end of town."

The county's new Justice Center is one of four planned or in-progress downtown projects. The city is building a new City Hall; the Two Rivers Convention Center is planning a $4 million expansion; and a new 70-room Hawthorn Suites hotel opened in July. It is the first downtown hotel since the 1970s. Brothers Kevin and Steve Reimer, Hawthorn Suites developers, are so confident of success, that they are planning another hotel -- the Hilton Garden Inn -- on the same two-acre parcel occupied by the Hawthorn.

"The convention center is downtown, and there were no rooms down here," Kevin said, just days before the Hawthorne opened. "All the hotels were out at the Interstate. A proposal was out for this parcel since the early '90s. I think no one else touched it because Grand Junction went through a bust when the oil shale industry died."

Barbara Creasman, executive director of the Downtown Development Authority (DDA), said plans for that area actually have been in place since 1962.

"There was a concept for a 'Super Block,'" Creasman said. "There would be a hotel, a convention center, other businesses. When the DDA was formed in '77, one of the goals was to look at that area and talk about redevelopment."

Using a special tax mill levy, the DDA purchased the Hawthorn Suites property for about $700,000 during a two-year period in the...