WHO OWNS COLORADO: LOVELAND.

• Author: TITUS, STEPHEN

Development in Loveland is really a tale of two cities.

In the east is the sprawling Centerra project, the vision of Chad and Troy McWhinney of McWhinney Enterprises. In the west and other parts of town are individual developers, each with 100 or so acres, trying to etch out a plan for their land.

The city of Loveland Planning Commission is in the middle, with the daunting task of coordinating the desires of builders with the city government's own ideas for growth.

The McWhinneys' stake in Loveland goes back to the mid-1800s, when U.S. presidents Johnson, Grant and Cleveland granted their family about 650 acres of flat farmland along what is now Interstate 25.

Taking the long view of land ownership, the family held the property, which is now controlled largely by brothers Chad, 29, and Troy, 27.

In 1993, Prime Retail chose the McWhinney's farm for its 350,000 square-foot Prime Outlets shopping center, which has become the anchor of northern Colorado's biggest development project. Centerra has grown to nearly 4,000 acres, and generates more tax dollars for the city of 50,000 than any other part of town.

In the past three years, the McWhinneys have added a 123,000 square-foot Target store, six restaurants, four office buildings, two hotels (a third is in the works), and hundreds of apartments and other residential offerings -- all in an area that was open farmland in 1997. The project is so large compared with others in the city that planners adopted a set of zoning rules specifically for Centerra. The four-inch-thick binder holding the 25-year master plan for the project sits like a monolith atop the desk of Loveland's chief planner, Greg George, and includes plans for $17.5 million in infrastructure to support $10 billion in industrial, retail, office and residential construction.

"It's really like a separate city out there," George said.

Loveland is a roll-up-the-sleeves kind of town, built on farming and ranching, a legacy still reflected in the surrounding green fields. Reactions were not always warm to buildings rising from this land, and that has put pressure on an old planning system that George admits was out of date.

For years, he said, rapidly expanding Loveland labored under an old plan that bogged down builders and planners in a laborious series of public hearings, sometimes for years, and left both sides without a long-term vision of where the city was heading. "It basically forced us to treat each project as it's own PUD...