Thornton officially has hit the big time, according to census estimates to be released today.
One hundred thousand people. The mark of a true city.
Now the challenge is getting everybody to recognize that.
Of cities that had 100,000 or more people in 2004, Thornton was the 12th-fastest-growing city in the nation since 2000, according to the census numbers. It was also the fastest-growing city in Colorado with a population over 100,000. But city officials say the city isn’t getting the recognition it needs to keep growing.
“It may have caught the rest of the metro area by surprise,” said city spokeswoman Jan Blunt. “A lot of people drive up here now and say, ‘Wow, I didn’t know all this was up here.”‘
The city added 19,522 people between 2000 and 2004, according to the census figures. New schools and hundreds of new houses are springing up in the once-barren lands north of 128th Avenue. A large new shopping complex is being built at Interstate 25 and Colorado 7.
But Thornton officials often have lamented a lack of adequate transportation funding to improve roads being used not only by the city’s swelling number of residents but by people from booming southern Weld County as well.
The city also had to apply for extra growing room within the Denver Regional Council of Governments’ growth boundary, after the city said the powerful metro planning organization used an old model that shortchanged Thornton on the space it needs to expand.
“It’s great that we’re at 100,000 now,” Blunt said. “But we’re expected to be at 250,000 in the next 20 years.”
Thornton has become the ninth city in the state with a population of more than 100,000, according to census numbers. DRCOG, using different methodology, also lists Centennial and Boulder as members of the 100,000 club, even though the census doesn’t.
Jeff Romine, a research economist with the University of Colorado at Boulder, said regional planners recognize Thornton’s growth, but they first need to address a backlog of projects that earlier growth in other parts of the metro area created.
“It’s not that they’re being ignored or not understood,” Romine said. “It’s that you’re putting yesterday and today’s problems against the problems of tomorrow.”
Romine doesn’t expect growth in Thornton or the rest of the north metro area to slow any time soon. The area has open land, affordable homes, close proximity to Denver and transportation corridors.
“They’ve been forewarned,” Elizabeth Garner, director of Colorado’s demography office, said of the looming growth. “We’ve been preaching in that northern metro area, southern Weld area for the last three or four years that it’s coming.”
There’s ample evidence of that already. Of the fastest- growing towns and cities in Colorado since 2000, many of them – Firestone, Severance, Frederick, Milliken, Evans and Erie – are in the I-25 corridor north of Denver.
“The same type of people who were looking at building in Highlands Ranch and the southern part of the metro area five years ago are now looking north,” Romine said. “That’s become the new gateway.”
Staff writer John Ingold can be reached at 720-929-0898 or jingold@denverpost.com.
