Starting gun fires for development at Ten Mile Road and I-84

Boise-based Brighton Corp. and the Boise office of Gardner Co. plan to break ground this summer on the first 75 acres of 800 acres at the Ten Mile Road/I-84 interchange, considered the most expansive, undeveloped, urban freeway interchange acreage between Portland and Salt Lake City.

The city of Meridian has been contemplating development at the pastureland for a decade, and described it as “not just another freeway interchange” in its 2007 Ten Mile Interchange Specific Area Plan.

Meridian envisions something other than the usual fast food establishments and service stations that routinely greet freeway travelers across America. The city has been planning something closer to all the components of live-work-play in the immediate surroundings, said Bruce Chatterton, the city’s community development director.

First comes work.

Brighton and Gardner are co-developers of the first two office buildings. Other proposed projects include a hotel right off the freeway and apartments, possibly in the multi-story retail-office-residential configuration.

Construction is set to start in August on a two-story, 70,000- square-foot office building that will house benefits administrator AmeriBen/IEC Group. A second construction start follows in September on a four-story, 60,000-square-foot office building, where Brighton will relocate its headquarters to fill 15,000 square.  Horrocks Engineers will take another 15,000 square feet. Both buildings are expected to be completed in May.

“We like to be where the action is,” said Brighton CEO David Turnbull, who has had his headquarters at the Boise Research Center for all the 25 years since he developed the 1.25 million-square-foot office park off Chinden Boulevard near Hewlett Packard.

Turnbull in 2006 bought two parcels adding up to 130 acres at Ten Mile Road just north of the freeway bridge before there was any certainty that a freeway interchange would be built. Meridian in collaboration with many agencies and private stakeholder – including Turnbull – wrote the specific area plan four years before the interchange opened – and before any of the 800 acres were within the Meridian city limits.

“This is kind of legacy stuff,” said Gardner Chief Operating Officer Tommy Ahlquist, whose company landed AmeriBen as the first tenant for the interchange.

Brighton/Gardner are the first developers to give a physical interpretation to Meridian’s specific area plan, which anticipates as many as 20,000 jobs in the four quadrants surrounding the Ten Mile interchange and as many as 6,000 homes.

“I see no reasons not to accomplish that,” Chatterton said. “It certainly is an urban village expected to have everything you’d have in a neighborhood. It would have employment, multi-family housing, single family housing, retail.”

A professional soccer stadium could also come into the conversation for Ten Mile Road.

So far, all the development interest is in the northeast quadrant, owned by Brighton and Treasure Valley Investments. TVI, managed by Mirazim Shakoori, owns 122 acres between the two Brighton properties. Retail West Properties is the Boise development partner with Treasure Valley Investments, and hasn’t started a development plan.

“We don’t have anything to announce,” said Retail West president Eric Davis. ” I can’t even guess what will come our way.”

Davis, however, recognizes the development potential.

“If you go from Salt Lake to Portland or Seattle, I don’t think you will find a large site that size that is zoned and ready to go,” Davis said.

Turnbull bought land at Ten Mile Road when 100,000 fewer people lived in Treasure Valley.

“There is nothing like this in Idaho,” Turnbull said. “Between here and Portland, this is it.”

No man’s land between Meridian and Nampa will become center of the valley

The city of Meridian annexed the Brighton and Treasure Valley Investments properties in 2014. A parcel of about 263 acres north of I-84 and east of Ten Mile Road became Meridian’s second urban renewal district on June 30. The other three quadrants remain unincorporated.

Brighton will install infrastructure in the urban renewal district, and the district will repay Brighton, Chatterton said.

The estimated cost of constructing the public infrastructure for the Ten Mile URD is $23.4 million, said Phil Kushlan, urban renewal consultant for the Ten Mile Road Urban Renewal District.

Chatterton anticipates the district will generate $48 million for the city over its 20-year life through increased property values with development. He believes it will take 16 years or less to pay off URD debt. Once the debt is cleared, Chatterton predicts Meridian will clear $5 million a year in tax revenue from Ten Mile Road.

The parcel still occupies a no-man’s land between Meridian and Nampa, but, everybody acknowledges the gap between Idaho’s second and third biggest cities will eventually close in, as the gap between Boise and Meridian evaporated in the 2000s.

One mile north of the Ten Mile/I-84 interchange, housing has already expanded a little more than 1 mile west of Ten Mile.

Within two miles of Ten Mile and Ustick Road, the population has soared from 16,000 to 36,000 since 2000 with a projected increase to 52,000 by 2040, by which time 104,000 people could be within three miles of Ustick and Ten Mile, according to projections calculated by Carl Miller, principal planner at the Community Planning Association of Southwest Idaho.

The Ten Mile Road interchange sits almost equidistant from downtown Boise and downtown Caldwell – with population growth projections trending westward.

“It is in center of the valley, literally,” Ahlquist said.

Brighton and Gardner are big players with big plans

Brighton is the Treasure Valley’s second largest homebuilder in the Treasure Valley, and developer of the second largest office park, Boise Research Center. Gardner built the tallest office building in Idaho, Eighth and Main, along with City Center Plaza, which is nearing completion; the Nampa Library Plaza; The Portico at Meridian; Eagle Island Crossing; St. Luke’s Nampa Medical Plaza; St. Luke’s Meridian Ambulatory Care Center and the West Valley Medical Complex in Caldwell.

Brighton has created several housing developments including Paramount, Syringa, Tuscany, SpurWing Greens, River Heights at Barber Valley and Park Place at Barber Station. Brighton also built the C.W. Moore Plaza tower and Idaho Independent Bank building, both in downtown Boise.

At Ten Mile Road, Brighton and Gardner are developing two properties. They are starting with the 75 acres at the freeway that Turnbull is calling Ten Mile Crossing.

The project architect is Babcock Design Group, which has worked with Gardner on most of its Treasure Valley Projects. The general contractor is ESI Construction.

The second 55 acres at Ten Mile and Franklin Road, which the duo is calling Ten Mile Creek, will have retail and some apartments. Gardner is in discussions with five retail users for Ten Mile Creek, Ahlquist said.

Brighton and Gardner are doing preliminary work on a combined 500 multi-family units for Ten Mile Crossing and Ten Mile Creek. They are considering a retail-office-apartment structure that planners tout as the most sought-after arrangement.

“We’re going to see if we can make it work,” Turnbull said.

Turnbull and Ahlquist anticipate adding 1.3 million square feet of office space at Ten Mile Crossing, with the first phase adding up to 130,000 square feet.

“We have a lot of great office tenants were talking with in the early stages,” Ahlquist said.

The project was initially mostly retail; now it’s mostly office with some retail.  Turnbull predicts more service-oriented retail, such as child care and health care providers, both of which could be the tenants of the second wave of buildings that Brighton/Gardner erect.

“We are creating a campus that corporate headquarters will want to locate at,” Turnbull said. “This will be the easiest access for any corporate campus in the Treasure Valley.”

Incorporating lifestyle into commercial development

With the Meridian specific area plan in mind, Ten Mile Crossing will not just be sterile buildings and parking. The developers said they seek to create a pedestrian-friendly layout with walking paths, a common gym, an outdoor activities center and day care.

Ahlquist also is working closely with AmeriBen to tap into the company’s corporate culture to design a building specific to company and employee needs. Daylight will dominate with open work areas and offices in the interior rather than along outer walls; parking will be behind the building.

The Brighton building will have parking all around the building – “that’s the nature of office buildings,” Turnbull said – but the design seeks to live up to the specific area plan. The Brighton building and future Ten Mile Crossing buildings will be closer to streets and sidewalks, with larger parking areas positioned away from streets, Turnbull said.

The shared corporate culture between Gardner and AmeriBen drew AmeriBen to Ten Mile Road, along with the ability to consolidate its offices in a single building. AmeriBen, which primarily handles health care benefits and also retirement benefits for more than 600 clients, now occupies four buildings at the Silverstone Corporate Center on Overland Road off Eagle Road.

“(Gardner’s design offers) those things that tend to foster an engaged workforce with accessible managers and supervisors with a collegial feel,” AmeriBen legal counsel Bryan Hall said.

Founded in 1958 and always located in the Boise area, AmeriBen has about 600 employees with plans to grow.

Making streets and parking user-friendly

Ten Mile Crossing will have a number of interior streets with limited vehicle access points to Ten Mile Road.

“Traffic will be distributed throughout the site and not to the perimeter,” Turnbull said.

Ada County Highway District designated just two mid-block, vehicle full-access points between Franklin and the freeway with two others limited to right-in, right-out turns. Ten Mile Road was widened from Overland Road to Franklin Road and the Overland/Ten Mile intersection was rerouted  a half mile to the south, ACHD spokeswoman Nicole Du Bois said.

“Limiting the number of access points and restricting turning movements for driveways near the signals should improve efficiency and reduce the potential for crashes on Ten Mile,” Du Bois said.

Underpasses beneath Ten Mile Road on either side of the freeway allow vehicles to travel from one commercial quadrant to another without impeding traffic on Ten Mile.

“As a result, the nearest access points (from the properties to Ten Mile Road) are about 1,500 feet north and south of the (freeway) interchange,” Du Bois said.

That means cars coming off or entering the freeway encounter minimal points of merging traffic from the commercial properties.

The Ten Mile Road Interchange opened in 2011 with the Idaho’s second single-point urban interchange, or SPUI, just one year after the first SPUI was built at Vista Road in Boise. Now, all four Idaho SPUIs are in the Treasure Valley, including the Broadway and Meridian Road interchanges.

“The SPUI is a more efficient way to move large amounts of traffic,” Idaho Transportation Department spokesman Reed Hollinshead said. “Have one set of traffic lights, there’s less conflict points, less starting and stopping. You don’t have to look different ways to see if it’s clear to go.”

Brighton, Gardner, Meridian, ACHD and the ITD sought to design a Ten Mile Road commercial area that did not repeat the traffic quagmire of Eagle Road.

The Ten Mile vision seeks live-work-play on the same acreage

Chatterton predict it will take about 10 years to “achieve the values shown in the specific plan” and 20 years for the full 800 acres to be developed.

“There are ways to take these buildings and create an urbanscape,” he said. “Another piece is taming the big box. Take the mass and break it up and make it look like a set of smaller buildings.”

The zoning for the northeast quadrant is mostly general commercial, where developers can seek conditional use permits for a wide variety of endeavors. Meridian specifically seeks mixed-use residential/commercial in a single structure, Chatterton said.

The specific area plan has a precise vision for the area, and that includes creating a place that stays busy and vital after the workday.

“For many employees, home will be upstairs, around the corner or down the street,” the plan says. “The area allows a range of land uses – from industrial to residential to commercial – in close proximity to each other.”

“We would encourage entertainment, themed restaurants,” Chatterton said. “It can’t be all service economy. We don’t encourage food manufacturing. We really want the buildings not to look like suburban development. We don’t want to look like every other interchange.”