Beloved restaurant vs. QuikTrip: A development dilemma just off I-70 in Jefferson County

EVERGREEN — Jean Shindel braves a biting December wind to pay homage to the weathered yellow-orange logs of the shuttered El Rancho restaurant, and warms her ears with daydreams of wedding receptions, $10 burgers and basement board meetings fueled by cinnamon rolls. 

What Jack Buchanan sees is a money pit that lost deep into the six figures each year it was open — a sprawling, aging, code-challenged mess that his partners would have leveled long ago. 

And that’s only half of the El Rancho exit dilemma playing out just up a hill from the thousands of cars and trucks blowing by every day on Interstate 70. 

Jack and Sherry Buchanan and their partners want to sell the property the restaurant sits on to QuikTrip, which plans a mammoth convenience store and gas station. The Buchanans are offering to work with QuikTrip to move the El Rancho with cranes and trucks across U.S. 40 to another property they own, to redevelop as part of a hotel, restaurant and shopping area. No QuikTrip, no El Rancho rescue, they say. 

The polite version of the neighbors’ reaction? “No, thanks.” Nearly 1,700 people have signed a petition against the development, and 40 neighbors will brave gusty winds on short notice to talk to any reporter who asks. 

“It’s been here since 1948,” said Bob Randall, who worked at El Rancho in the 1970s and ran The Observatory bar across U.S. 40 in the ’80s and ’90s. “To tear it down I think would be terrible for Colorado and certainly for Evergreen. This is the gateway to Evergreen. Do we need a truck stop here?”

Neighbor Annie Sill knows more change is coming — over the group’s shoulders, across Evergreen Parkway, are a Home Depot, a Walmart, a McDonald’s, a gas station and other paved-paradise amenities. She’s trying not to cling to nostalgia for an Evergreen that maybe never actually was “the way it was.” 

“You’re never going back to that,” Sill said. “It is changing everywhere, you know, but you just have to make sure that people aren’t getting stomped on.”

A growing group of residents and community members have launched a “Save El Rancho” campaign to stop the QuikTrip Corporation from building a gas station and semi truck fueling stations at the former El Rancho site in Evergreen. (Kathryn Scott, Special to The Colorado Sun)

A cause without a law to back it 

The vocal opposing neighbors have been remarkably successful at publicizing their cause. They’ve had multiple TV stories, with the telegenic, interstate-beckoning neon El Rancho sign in the background and doomed pine trees in the foreground. Writers remember a friendly drink at the bar and lament Colorado’s decades of change. 

The opponents have printed protest placards and designed a detailed campaign website, Save El Rancho. They buttonhole members of the town board and county commission, from the skating pond on Evergreen Lake to the parking lots of Elk Meadow open space, a dog-walking haven. 

What they haven’t done, Jack Buchanan says, is mention anyone who wants to buy the restaurant and run it again onsite, or suggest any nonlaughable development idea for either side of U.S. 40. The tangle of roads at the site is a challenge to drivers and developers — the “El Rancho” exit from eastbound I-70 quickly joins U.S. 40, runs past a Comfort Inn and the idle restaurant and a bank, then runs into Highway 74/Evergreen Parkway. Neighbors muse aloud of a dog park, an urgent care, a welcome center. 

“It’s not reality,” said Buchanan, who is the local partner on the El Rancho site and has lived with his wife in Evergreen for 11 years. The Buchanans have partners on the restaurant site, and are developing the former Observatory bar site across U.S. 40 with other partners. “It just simply isn’t reality.” 

QuikTrip did not respond to messages seeking comments about its plans. Buchanan says that if the development opponents succeed in making the deal look too messy for QuikTrip’s interests, a different gas station is still the realistic outcome. The restaurant grounds, which include the shuttered bank, are zoned for commercial use and no rezoning is necessary for any of the proposals. 

“Let’s say someone was looking for a rezoning over by Elk Meadow,” Buchanan said, mentioning the popular open space a couple of hills southward, at the turnoff from Evergreen Parkway to Mount Blue Sky. “My wife and I would be flipping out over that, too.” 

A relocated El Rancho would be part of a hotel and small shopping area with appealing Rocky Mountain design elements, Buchanan said. But theirs are valuable commercial pieces of property inside a heavily commercialized zone of north Evergreen at Swede Gulch, where Highway 74/Evergreen Parkway meets I-70 and U.S. 40. 

“We’re planning to develop it for the appropriate uses that are there,” he said. “It is on the interstate. Period.”

The neighbors are still searching for wrenches to throw in the works. Jefferson County is not offering them any at the moment. 

“The El Rancho restaurant is not a designated historic structure, and under current zoning a gas station would be permitted. With the current zoning no approvals are needed by either the Jefferson County Board of Commissioners or the Jefferson County Historical Commission,” county community relations manager Jeremy Fleming said in an email. 

Jeffco, unlike some Front Range communities, does not allow third parties, like the neighbors group, to seek historic designation for buildings like the restaurant that would slow demolition or redevelopment.

How many gas stations are enough?

Both of the proposed development areas must go through the county’s site development process and approvals, Fleming added. “These regulations cover ingress and egress, parking, lighting, landscaping, architecture, runoff, and so on. After completing the site development process, the developer would then need to pull permits for building the project.” 

The soonest thing to happen will be a fill permit for the former Observatory bar property, wedged between the interstate and U.S. 40. The sloped property needs landfill to create a development pad, Buchanan said. Many of the site approvals and permits the developers need could be done within 10 to 12 weeks, he said. 

As the opponents group points to the wooded hills above and below the El Rancho restaurant site, they note that site maps filed by the developers show the pavement area doubled for the QuikTrip service lanes, and most of the trees ripped out. They say they will emphasize to county planning reviewers and the Colorado Department of Transportation how much new car and semitrailer traffic the gas station will bring, clogging exits and key arteries already threatened with jams during wildfire evacuations. 

Organizer Kathryn Mauz also wants county and state officials to think about bigger-picture development in Colorado, pitting the convenience factor for tourists against the desires of longtime residents in everything from affordable housing to pricing. Residents are still steaming about prices at El Rancho when the owners brought in noted Denver restaurateur Frank Bonanno to reopen the place: $18 burgers and a mandatory 20%-plus service fee on every check. 

Mauz created a map showing 32 other gas stations in the Jeffco foothills. Lakewood will vote in January to slow growth of its gas stations, of which there are already 56. Louisville just voted to cap its stations at the current total of six. Denver’s City Council is considering rules to push any new gas stations at least a quarter-mile from existing stations, in an effort to focus development on new affordable housing ideas instead of new convenience and retail. 

“If you look at our map of all the other gas stations, keep in mind too that the average size of those stations is 0.8 to 2 acres,” Mauz said. “This one would be 4 acres.” 

Buchanan emphasizes that every potential buyer or developer who has looked at the El Rancho property has assumed the circa 1948 restaurant is torn down, as a start. Attacking the overall proposal and scaring away the cooperative QuikTrip developers just jeopardizes the opponents’ goal of preserving a building full of their memories, he said. 

“We really want to save the El Rancho, and we’re doing everything we can to do it,” Buchanan said. “And candidly, they’re making it really hard for us to do it.” 

Annie Sill thinks one of the challenges for development opponents like her is overcoming outside perceptions of Evergreen as a bedroom community full of expensive mountain retreats for Front Range commuters. 

The neighbors’ group is peppered with waitresses and bar managers and part-time retail clerks who spend time and paychecks at their favorite businesses. They don’t want their money or their memories dismissed. To them, facial recognition means other cafes in the area that retain a free coffee policy for residents. 

“You’ve got to take care of your locals,” Sill said.