1-Color
May 9, 2014
75 cents Arapahoe County, Colorado | Volume 94, Issue 12 A publication of
englewoodherald.net
City hosting business summit Elizabeth Garner, Brad Segal are guest speakers for upcoming free event By Tom Munds
tmunds@coloradocommunitymedia.com Speakers discussing demographics and economic development headline this year’s Englewood Business Summit being held from 7:30 to 10 a.m. May 15 in Hampden Hall on the second floor of the Englewood Civic Center, 1000 Englewood Parkway.
The free event begins with a continental breakfast and an opportunity to chat with other members of the Englewood business community. The session will open with a few comments from city officials and the speakers will be introduced. The first speaker is Elizabeth Garner, the state demographer. She will be talking about the work her office does in assembling population and economic forecasts based on demographics and the impact changing demographics have on communities. She will be followed to the podium by Brad Segal, who is founder and president of Progressive Urban Management As-
sociates, which is a real estate economics consulting firm. He will talk about the real estate market and economic development. The meeting will wrap up with a question-and-answer session with the Englewood City Council. About three years ago, the Englewood City Council asked staff to investigate the possibility of holding a business summit in the city. “We held the first Englewood Business Summit in February 2013. The weather wasn’t great and we still had more than 100 people attend the event,” said Darren Hollingsworth, one of those organizing and staging the business summit. “We decided to hold the event in the late spring. Reser-
vations are coming in slowly but we hope to equal or exceed last year’s attendance.” Sean Rakestraw, a commercial real estate broker, said he attended last year’s summit and found it helpful. “The speakers were pretty good but the most valuable thing was getting to meet and talk with members of the Englewood business community,” the Denver man said. “The time spent was valuable because I learned about the Englewood business community and it helps me because I have clients looking for locations in the area.” To learn more about the summit go to www.englewoodgov.org/doing-business/2014 business summit. Reservations also can be made online.
Red-light cameras still a go Measure hits brick wall upon reaching House By Vic Vela
vvela@coloradocommunitymedia.com
A crew funnels concrete into what will be the foundation of the new school as phase two of construction gets underway at the Englewood High School site. Phase two includes the construction of the high school and other facilities that will be part of the seventh- through 12th-grade campus scheduled to open in January 2015. Photo by Tom Munds
School overhaul enters phase two Construction work set to overshadow demolition By Tom Munds
tmunds@colorado communitymedia.com As demolition wraps up at the Englewood High School project, the focus shifts to phase two construction of a sevenththrough 12th-grade campus. “The demolition of the high school building is about completed,” said Donovan Nolan, project manager. “Demolition crews are wrapping up their work as they clean up the site and truck the remainder of the debris off the site. At the same time, work on construction of the new building is already started.” He said the demolition took a little longer than expected, because as crews began
tearing down the structures they discovered construction in the 1950s used a lot more concrete. “They poured thicker slabs than today and it takes longer to break up those thick slabs,” Nolan said. “The result was the demolition recovered less steel than forecast but were able to recycle more concrete than expected.” With the old building removed, the work now shifts to construction. The massive excavators used for demolition soon will move off the site and be replaced by earthmoving equipment preparing the ground and trucks bringing in concrete for the foundations. Nolan said crews will spend about a month putting in the foundation along the east side of the site near the field house. “We have about 100 people working on site,” he said. “The most visible work right now is pouring the foundation. Within
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about a month, crews should begin putting the steel for the new building in place, starting on the east and moving west.” At the same time, the construction crews will be doing site preparation that includes bringing in tons of fill dirt. “A lot of work is necessary to prepare the site for the new building,” Nolan said. “We will be bringing in about 26,000 cubic yards of fill dirt to bring the area around what will be the main building entrance up to street level.” The campus transformation will cost about $40 million, which is available because voters gave the district approval to sell bonds. Plans called for demolition of all the Englewood High School buildings except the auditorium and field house, which will undergo major renovation. The project goal was to replace the existing school with a new, state-of-the-art facility for seventh- through 12th-graders. Also, the project included major renovation of Englewood Middle School, so when middle-school students move to the new campus, Colorado’s Finest Alternative High School will move into the current middleschool facility. Work began in 2012 on phase one, which included demolition of the pool, the Lowell Building and the shops to create the space for construction of what will become the School continues on Page 13
After a bill cruised through the Senate, the House last week put the brakes on the measure, which sought to ban red-light cameras and photo radar systems in Colorado. The legislation officially met its demise during a House Appropriations Committee hearing on April 30, but the bill’s sponsor, House Speaker Mark Ferrandino, D-Denver, had pretty much accepted its defeat before it even got there. Senate Bill 14 would have prohibited local governments from using photoradar technol- Report ogy to capture drivers who speed or run red lights. It was gutted by the House State, Veterans and Military Affairs Committee, which passed a stripped-down version of the bill on April 28. The gutted version only would have allowed for a state study of the technology’s public-safety effectiveness, something that Ferrandino didn’t think was necessary. “I think we have enough studies to show that it’s not effective,” Ferrandino told the Appropriations Committee. Ferrandino and other bill supporters argued that photo-radar technology is a cash cow used by local governments to rack up revenue, courtesy of lead-foot drivers. The House speaker also said the technology does little to prevent accidents. “They give a sense of public safety, but don’t actually increase public safety,” Ferrandino said. But several law-enforcement representatives testified otherwise during the committee process. Supporters of the technology asserted that the devices serve as a blessing for understaffed police agencies and that the presence of the cameras curbs bad habits on the
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