Harold Smethills

Harold Smethills, the visionary behind the new water-efficient, sustainable Sterling Ranch community in northwest Douglas County, was selected Industry Leader for Residential Real Estate in the Denver Business Journal’s Power Book 2011 awards.

The DBJ noted that Smethills, who has been building successful companies his entire career, is on a mission to build metro Denver’s largest housing development in years with 12,050 homes.

“We’re basically creating a whole new city and all the services that go with it,” Smethills, managing director of the community that will be home to 31,000 residents in 20 years, told the DBJ.

Smethills and the principals of family-owned Sterling Ranch—Diane Smethills and Jack Hoagland—spent nearly a decade meeting with neighbors, local business groups and public officials before winning approval of the $4.3 billion project from the Douglas County Commissioners in May.

Cut his teeth at Coors

Making the Sterling Ranch community Colorado’s most water-efficient is key for Smethills, a former Adolph Coors senior executive who shaped his water conservation and sustainability thinking under beer patriarch William Coors.

The county commissioners in a unanimous vote approved integrating water conservation into land planning and thereby reducing the county’s historic water requirements by almost half. The Sterling Ranch approach to conservation and land planning is revolutionary.

Smethills said Sterling Ranch never could have made it without the people who contributed to the vision for water efficiency, sustainability and innovative solutions to regional problems.

Smethills credited the state legislature for changing Colorado water law to permit rainwater harvesting, the Colorado Water Conservation Board for naming Sterling Ranch the state’s first rainwater harvesting pilot project, the Denver Botanic Gardens for helping Sterling Ranch demonstrate that water demand can be dramatically reduced, the Douglas County staff for developing water conservation plans with Sterling Ranch, and the many neighbors who testified at public hearings in support of the new community.

“At the end of the day, it took the courage and leadership of the Douglas County Commissioners who stood up for water conservation by unanimously approving Sterling Ranch’s zoning and water appeal,” Smethills said.

Sterling Ranch, between Chatfield and Roxborough state parks, expects to begin construction late next year on the new community, which will promote Colorado’s outdoor lifestyle by preserving 37 percent of the land for open space and creating 30 miles of hiking, biking and horseback-riding trails.

Contact John Rebchook at JRCHOOK@gmail.com

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Contact John Rebchook at JRCHOOK@gmail.com or 303-945-6865.

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The concept of Agriburbia, embraced at the planned Sterling Ranch, among other things is to replace grass with gardens such as this one.

It was raining while I was writing this.

But as we all know, it doesn’t always rain in Colorado.  Adequate water increasingly is the most critical element of new housing development.

That was why it was such a delight to meet last week with the three principals of the planned 3,120-acre Sterling Ranch, west of Santa Fe Avenue at Titan Road in unincorporated Douglas County.

The principals have business creds.

Sterling Ranch is a family affair

Harold Smethills is the former president of Adolph Coors Co.’s spin-off ACX Technologies and CEO of Menasha Corp., a giant packaging company based in Wisconsin, his wife, Diane, and her brother, Jack Hoagland, are the land developers of this development. Hoagland is a former executive at Richmond American Homes and Carma Colorado.  Hoagland, who has generations of ranch-blood running through his veins, is the brother of Diane, who has 35 years of marketing, real estate development and finance experience.

Sterling Ranch will be the largest real-world  laboratory for saving water ever seen in Colorado.  I believe it will be a model for conserving water across the country.

Consider one aspect of virtually every aspect of virtually every home community in the country – green lawns.

Putting down roots, with little grass

“Grass lawns should be a throw rug, not a carpet,” Harold Smethills told me.

Rather than have a sea of water-hungry Kentucky Bluegrass in the 10,000 to 12,000 homes that eventually could be built in Sterling Ranch, the three principals envision homeowners donating their lawns to vegetable gardens.

“That is a trend that is not going away,” said Hoagland, who is an organic farmer and rancher, with spreads as far away as Oklahoma.

“If you just look at the carbon imprint of a can of tomatoes – from the time it is picked to every time it is touched before it ends up in a grocery aisle, it is pretty amazing,” he said.

The transportation impact on the environment will be totally eliminated at Sterling Ranch. Imagine people growing their own tomatoes, cucumbers and other vegetables, sold at neighborhood farmer markets at Sterling Ranch, free of pesticide, using infrastructure that scientifically uses water extremely efficient.

Agriburbia embraced

The principals have embraced a concept called “Agriburbia,” a trade-marked term by the Golden-based TSR Group, a design and sustainable development management firm.

The idea behind Agriburbia is to combine positive social, cultural, physical and financial characteristics from urban and rural lifestyles to create a new land-use concept.

“It is about re-thinking and re-defining how we use land and water and how and where we grow food – and it touches on all the other resources and components of 21st century land development,” according to the firm.

You will not see the sprinkler systems spewing water over sidewalks and into streets, as you do on virtually any Denver street, when the first homes are built at Sterling Ranch over the next few years.  One surprising finding from a coalition of experts, he said, is that the drip systems work best during the hottest part of the day, while sprinklers, of course, should be used late at night or early.

Also, thanks to new legislation that they lobbied for and signed by Gov. Bill Ritter in June, people in Colorado can now harvest rainwater, which you couldn’t do before.

“In the past, you couldn’t legally buy rain barrels, and now they’re flying off the shelf at Home Depot and Lowe’s,” Smethills said.

Neighbors share water

Ten percent of the water they get from the Platte River will be available to neighbors, who depend on aquifers that are running dry. They will sell them the water at the market price, and will take neither a profit nor a loss on the water.

“If our neighbors don’t succeed, we won’t succeed,” Smethills said.

All told, they anticipate Sterling Ranch will use 50 percent less water than a typical community this size. I’m betting they are going to exceed that goal and this will put Colorado on the map for saving water and using it wisely. One thing they are researching is technology that would allow them to “re-charge” the Platte River with water during normal and wet months, so there will be plenty of water available during droughts.

I’d also wager that Sterling Ranch could bring new meaning to “gentleman (and gentlewoman) farmer.”

Hoagland note that a lot of the concepts at Sterling Ranch  – living off the land, sharing locally grown food and being good stewards of the precious water – are aspects of life that rural farmers took for granted.

“It’s really back to the future,” Smethills said.

Contact John Rebchook at JRCHOOK@gmail.com or 303-945-6865

Related Posts:

• DBJ honors water visionary
• WSJ focuses on Sterling Ranch and water
• Sterling Ranch rezoning official
• Sterling Ranch lands water-pilot program
• Sterling Ranch adds 415 acres