A community market

BY BELEN WARD BWARD@COLORADOCOMMUNITYMEDIA.COM

Fort Lupton residents opened their garages and yards to sell goodies and all sorts of second-hand items to treasure hunters across the city on July 7 and 8. e city hosts the sale annually, registering the homes hosting sales and publishing a map showing the locations and addresses.

is year, 50 homes participated in the sale, setting up tables on their yards and in their garages.

FROM PAGE 1 volunteers event to help food banks and schools,” Hudak said.

Hudak said they project auctioning about 300 vehicles a week when at full maturity, the facility will recondition up to 480 cars per week. e company plans invest about $25 million in the Fort Lupton facility.

“Traditionally, we do this type of work at our 240 retail stores and about 90 facilities we do auctions and reconditioning with the sales facilities,” Hudak said.

Moving responsibility from retail stores e other piece is they take trade-ins. Some of them qualify and go through reconditioning. Vehicles that don’t qualify won’t be auctioned.

Hudak said since COVID, the company is purchasing more cars from regular folks as trade-ins. e company buys vehicles and makes o ers even if the customer doesn’t buy a car from them. ey found their retail operations need more capacity on-site to store the cars.

“We have been looking around for about up 18 months for a larger site where we can take these components out of our retail stores and do them separately it’s the purpose why we are looking at a site like this one in Fort Lupton,” Hudak said.

Hudak said there are two components to their plans. First is the reconditioning center, which conducts a 125-point full inspection on all cars that come in, and routine maintenance for the resales of the car.

“We are the third largest auction house in the country. It’s what we will be doing primarily on-site. We get our inventory from two places the general public and we go to an auction called Manheim. ey are the largest car auction house in the country it where we go to buy cars for our lot. But more than half our cars come from the general public trade-ins,” Hudak said.

Just wholesale

Mayor Zo Hubbard asked if the general public could buy from this site.

“No. On the auction side, the customers are licensed and pre-approved with CarMax,” Hudak said. Hubbard also asked about tra c concerns.

“We have an auction place here where I see semis loading cars it creates horrible tra c,” Hubbard said. “It is unsightly and dangerous for the public with people loading on both sides of the street and I want to make sure we address all of that business on the front side.”

Abigail Bartolo with CenterPoint Integrated Solutions, who submitted the application representing the CarMax site, the way the site is set up, so there would be no tra c problems. Bartolo said there would be customer and employee parking on the east of the site. ere will be public access within the area of the site to the north with car carrier spaces.

“ e car carriers that come in to unload and load are 100 feet long and the car carriers are 75 feet long,” Bartolo said. “CarMax makes sure there is extra room for loaded and unloading to avoid having safely issued in this area with any of these dealers that come in and are buying cars and utilize these spaces as well.” e council approved a third ling for plan unit development for the CarMax site of 39.22 acres, combining three vacant parcels into a single parcel. It includes a railroad easement and a space for a detention pond on the west side of North Land Drive, 400 yards south of Weld County Road 18, east of Union Paci c railroad tracks. e property is currently under contract commitment for sale to CarMax Superstores.

Bartolo said to the west will be a staging area where cars are stored and waiting to be inspected, auctioned, and reconditioned. On the north, they will have a nonpublic car wash and fuel pump that is only used by the reconditioning operation and are nonpublic with two access driveways.

“Its a secure and screened areas and on the east side and north there are six-foot walls and chain link fences with guard rail for screening. Its secure area will be access by delta gates with access key cards,” Bartolo said.

Bartolo said the auction would take place in an enclosed building, and the staging area is the production building so that the public will access it.

Recreation center renovation

In other business, the council approved Adolfson & Peterson Construction to hire subcontractors at a cost of $6.5 million for the Fort Lupton Recreation Center renovation project. e project’s designs are nished and construction plans are about halfway complete.

Monte Shuman, Recreation Director, said it to allows Adolfson & Peterson to start securing funding and pricing with a second round of nal drawings, which is part of securing vendors under contract.

“ is will be the pool contract, steel, HVAC, and plumbing for those types of areas. ey got pricing for that, so it’s about 60% of the project,” Shuman said. “ ere will be other rounds later, which would be the nal price. But we could get things started so we are not getting too far behind on the way procurement is and supplies, so we want to stay ahead of that.”

Council also approved a policy to charge booth fees for city events. Mari Pena, City Clerk, asked for a resolution to establish booth fees to create the continuity of their various event sponsors.

She said the city will be asking for no fees for organizations awarded a 501c3 classi cation by the IRS if they are in good standing by the Colorado Secretary of State. For all other organizations, the city will charge an individual booth fee of $20.

Councilmen Carlos Baron said, “Do we provide a tent and table for them?

Pena said they bring their own.