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GE Johnson is constructing two physically connected Air Force Academy projects with separate owners and design teams
A new visitor center and hotel just outside the North Gate of the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs are pretty hard to miss. The multi-planed roof design of the former conjures images of fighter jets staggered underneath each other, and the two structures are connected via a pedestrian bridge.
The budgets for construction-$38 million for the Hosmer Visitor Center and $170 million for the 375room Hotel Polaris-are only about half of the total outlay for the $500-million project, which also includes earthwork and infrastructure. There are also plans for office and retail developments on the 57-acre parcel, branded TrueNorth Commons.
Colorado Springs-based GE Johnson won the design-build RFP along with Fentress Architects of Denver for the visitor center; Atlanta-based BLUR Workshop won the design contract for the hotel. Wichita, Kan.-based Wildcat Cos. spearheaded the $22-million infrastructure project, which included the pedestrian bridge connecting the hotel and visitor center over North Gate Boulevard.
The overall project concept originated as one of several of the City of Champions projects that garnered $120.5 million in state tax incentives via the Regional Tourism Act in 2014. Dan Schnepf, president of Blue & Silver Development Partners, has been working on the project for about a decade.
Schnepf started Blue & Silver to pursue the project. "Obviously, blue and silver are the colors of the Air Force Academy," he says. "I'm a 1983 graduate of [the academy], and I wanted to do something to give back to the institution."
Schnepf calls the project "a unique private-public partnership" that had two false starts. "The Air Force put out an RFP in 2015 and another one in 2017," he explains. "They did not allow for the use of public funding in the project-in other words, bonding." While Schnepf assembled a design-build team and responded to both proposal requests, funding "kept falling off the table in the congressional budgeting process," he says.
At Schnepf's urging, the academy's stance changed with a subsequent RFP in 2019 that allowed for bond financing. "We ended up doing what's called an enhanced-use lease," he explains. "It's basically a barter program. They take a piece of underutilized property, and...