2025 Market Facts VRP - Flipbook - Page 49
ECO NO MI C PRO FI L E & MA R K ET FACT S 2025 | 41
PROFILE
5,795
POPULATION
DALLAS HELTZELL/BIZWEST
Former Stanley Hotel owner
John Cullen’s development
of the F.O. Stanley Chocolate
Factory in downtown Estes
Park is nearly complete.
6.9
SQUARE MILES
3,025
HOUSEHOLDS
ESTES PARK
Scenic mountain village to
share Sundance spotlight
ESTES PARK — Already acclaimed for its scenic location and access to Rocky Mountain
National Park, Estes Park will share a new spotlight. The high-country village played a key role
in luring the Sundance Film Festival from Utah to Colorado and is likely to play a bigger part
when the festival arrives in Boulder in 2027.
A public-private entity closed on the sale of the iconic Stanley Hotel and its 41-acre Estes
Park campus in a complex deal that will jumpstart development of the Stanley Film Center.
The 117-year-old hotel, which inspired Stephen King’s novel “The Shining” and the movie version by Stanley Kubrick, helped make the case for Colorado by hosting the Sundance Directors
Lab program in 2024.
John Cullen, whose Grand Heritage Hotel Group sold the hotel to the state-backed entity,
also gave the town a boost by purchasing Nederland’s annual March “Frozen Dead Guy Days”
festival, moving it to Estes, and opening a Cryonics Museum in the hotel’s historic ice house to
house the frozen corpse of the festival’s namesake, “Grandpa” Bredo Morstoel.
Cullen’s next project is developing an ornate F.O. Stanley Chocolate Factory in a structure
that formerly held the Old Church Shops in downtown Estes Park. The upper levels of that
building will be part of a multi-phased improvement project for Cleave Street, the east-west
corridor north of downtown’s busy Elkhorn Avenue.
Estes Park has a year-round population of slightly more than 6,000. But in summer, when
throngs of visitors escape the lowland heat for a dose of cool mountain adventure, the town
grows by the tens of thousands, prompting adoption of paid parking in the downtown core,
a color-coded free transit system, an accompanying all-day parking pass, and a timed-entry
system for the national park designed to ease crowding.
The challenge for the town and its economic-development infrastructure has been to build
a more viable year-round economy while also addressing how best to improve the experience
for the hordes of tourists that crowd the village in summer. Toward that end, the town turned
downtown streets into a one-way loop with the aim of easing summer traffic jams.
Estes Park’s alpine surroundings attract visitors and new residents alike. The Big Thompson
and Fall rivers rush downhill from the park to converge in the center of town. The Rooftop
Rodeo, Independence Day fireworks over the lake and the massive Longs Peak Scottish-Irish
Festival on the weekend after Labor Day have roared back after weathering pandemic-related
restrictions.
Expanded health-care options are available in the Estes Valley now that an agreement for
Estes Park Health to affiliate with UCHealth has been completed.
Estes voters addressed the need for affordable workforce housing by approving an increase
in the lodging tax from 2% to 5.5%, allocating the additional 3.5% – revenue estimated to be
around $5.25 million – to fund workforce housing and child-care initiatives.
A pair of successful citizen petitions will send voters back to the polls in November. One of
the initiatives would require written approval from a two-thirds majority of property owners
within a 500-foot radius of a property undergoing rezoning or a Planned Unit Development
before the change can be approved. The other initiative would repeal a section of the Estes Park
Development Code that provides density bonuses in multifamily residential zones as incentives
for the construction of affordable, attainable and workforce housing in multifamily residential
zones.
$73,313
MEDIAN HOUSEHOLD
INCOME
FOR SALE
OPEN
TAX
$750,000
MEDIAN HOME
SALE PRICE
541
NO. OF BUSINESSES
8.7%
CITY, COUNTY,
STATE SALES TAX
56.2%
BACHELOR’S DEGREE
OR HIGHER
ONLINE RESOURCES
Estes Park Chamber of Commerce
www.esteschamber.org
Colleen DePasquale, executive director
info@esteschamber.org
Town of Estes Park
https://estespark.colorado.gov
Gary Hall, mayor
ghall@estes.org
Travis Machalek, town administrator
tmachalek@estes.org
Larimer County Economic & Workforce Development
www.larimer.org/ewd
Adam Crowe, Economic Development Manager
acrowe@larimer.org
