By Greg Avery
Camera Staff Writer

The switch of museums for a long-awaited building project in the heart of downtown Boulder is expected to get a city endorsement this week.

The Boulder History Museum is scheduled to be qualified tonight as a new partner in a civic building planned as part of a long-awaited hotel construction project at Ninth Street and Canyon Boulevard.

The history museum will officially replace the Collage Children's Museum as the civic-use partner with the Village Arts Coalition dance group. The two will try to fund construction of a $9 million building in the southeast corner of the 2.7-acre site.

DeAnne Butterfield, the history museum's executive director, said the accessibility of the Ninth Street and Canyon Boulevard property makes it a terrific location and has the museum's board excited.

"We want to be a player in downtown, and we want to make it our home for a long time," Butterfield said. "We want to be where people already are."

The land was declared blighted property in the early 1980s and made part of the Boulder Urban Renewal Authority district. Since then, several plans to build on the property have fallen through.

Boulder-based St. Julien Partners won city approval in 2000 to build a four-story hotel atop a publicly owned underground parking garage.

The city required that developers dedicate 20 percent of building space on the property for public use.

Last year, Collage Children's Museum and the Village Arts Coalition received approval to build a distinctive, modern-looking building on a portion of the property.

In March, the children's museum board decided to stop trying to raise the $6 million needed to build its part of the building.

Leslie Durgin, Collage Children's Museum executive director, said the nonprofit had difficulty raising money and concluded that there were better ways to spend money for the benefit of children.

The Boulder History Museum applied to take its place. The history museum is reportedly in better shape to fund the civic-use building than was Collage Children's Museum.

In 1997, Emil and Virginia Christensen, members of the history museum since 1958, left the museum one half of their estate. The money is adequate to pay for the civic-use building, Butterfield said.

On Monday, the Downtown Management Commission — which has to authorize civic groups in the project — endorsed the history museum as a qualified participant, and the City Council is expected to give its approval tonight.

"It's an action that really gets them in the game," said Molly Winter, head of the downtown parking district that will run the underground parking garage underneath the site.

Late last month, St. Julien Partners pulled its building permit for the hotel.

The project's financing has not been finalized yet, nor has developer Bruce Porcelli signed agreements with the city over the partnership to build the 656-space parking garage.

Porcelli said various aspects of the project are moving along, but it's difficult to predict when the construction of the independent hotel will begin.

"Along U.S. 36, you see a lot of things go up, but they're prototypical cookie-cutter hotels," he said. "This one isn't."

Contact Greg Avery at (303) 473-1307 or averyg@thedailycamera.com.

June 4, 2002

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