Thunderdome Indoor Paintball LaPorte, CO

[Grendel]

County backs Jax's paintball vision
By KEVIN DUGGAN
KevinDuggan@coloradoan.com


Paintball enthusiasts may soon have a place to rumble in LaPorte.

Larimer County commissioners on Monday approved a proposal to convert a 37,000-square-foot building used to store material at the former Holcim cement plant into an indoor paintball facility tabbed the Jax Thunderdome.

The approval will allow Jax Outdoor Gear, which owns the building and the surrounding 35 acres, to apply for a building permit to make improvements to the site so it can open the business.

Jax hopes to have the facility open as soon as possible, said Michael Chalona, principal with Land Images Inc., a planning and landscape architecture firm that helped the company develop its proposal to the county.

A few minor changes will have to be done to the property to meet county conditions for approval and landscaping and lighting plans have to be submitted, Chalona said. Little construction would be needed on the site since existing buildings and parking lots would be used.

“There is sensitivity to how much lighting we use because it is a rural area; we don’t want it to glow,” Chalona said.

Some of the buildings on the property are already in use. A caretaker lives in a house that was Holcim’s administrative offices and other buildings are being used for storage.

The Thunderdome would be open only during daylight hours, primarily on weekends, said Rob Helmick, principal planner with the county. Players would check in at a former office building on the site and then be driven to the dome.

Inside the dome, inflatable structures would be used to form bunkers and obstacle courses. The building likely would be divided into quarters with netting so more than one game could go on at any time, Chalona said.

Jax owner Jim Quinlan could not be reached for comment. In a previous interview, Quinlan said he bought the site and its eight buildings when Holcim auctioned its holdings in 2005 with an eye toward reusing the buildings.

The popular outdoor equipment store does “a fair amount of business” in paintball equipment, such as guns and protective gear, and customers frequently ask where they can play, he said.

Dropped from the Jax proposal were plans for horse-boarding facilities and a riding arena on the property, Chalona said. That part of the proposal seemed to slow down and “muddy” the process for approval, he said.

The Holcim cement plant closed in 2002 after 75 years of operation. Its property covered 3,000 acres and stretched nearly five miles north of the plant.

So far, the Thunderdome is the only substantive proposal for developing former Holcim-owned land the county has reviewed, Helmick said.

A consortium of investors has submitted a conceptual plan for creating 44 lots on a 458-acre conservation development northeast of the plant site. The plan will receive its initial review by planning staff later this week, Helmick said.

[CannedWolf]

It used to be a cement plant and the county is concerned about lighting and noise levels. God I love politics.