Drive south on Broadway past Redlands Parkway and you hit a roundabout that's been there since 2018, smooth and familiar, the kind of intersection nobody thinks about anymore. Keep going another half mile toward 23 Road and you hit a second one still under construction, cones stacked along both shoulders, flaggers waving you through a reduced speed zone, and a chain-link perimeter around dirt that used to be open range for anyone with a mountain bike.
Two roundabouts within sight of each other on the same half mile of highway looks like overkill until you understand why the second one exists. It isn't there because Broadway got busier on its own. It's there because Redlands 360, the master-planned community that's been quietly buying and platting land on the mesa above Broadway for years, is about to add up to 1,300 homes to a corridor that was never built for that kind of volume. The roundabout is the infrastructure equivalent of a receipt. Somebody already approved the growth. This is just the part where the neighborhood watches it get poured in concrete.
Why the City Called In Its Own Engineer to Explain a Traffic Circle
Most road projects get a press release. This one got a quote from Trent Prall, the city's engineering and transportation director, who told a Grand Junction television station that the Broadway and 23 Road roundabout will serve as the primary entrance to one of the largest residential developments the city has taken on in the last three or four decades. That's not routine language for a single-lane traffic circle, and it's not there by accident. The roundabout is being built specifically to serve as the front door to Redlands 360, and the city wanted residents who've watched roundabouts multiply along Broadway over the years to know this one is different in scale, not just in location.
The mechanics of the project explain the rest. Preliminary grading began in April, with the main build starting June 1 and running through a targeted completion in December, weather permitting. Redlands 360 is covering the construction and 75 percent of the cost, with the city responsible for the remaining 25 percent and the eventual second-lane expansion. The contractor, Suncore Construction, is the same firm that recently built the Horizon Drive roundabout on the other side of town. The intersection is going in as a single lane now, but engineered with the footprint to expand to two lanes later, which tells you the city isn't guessing about future volume. It's building for it.
What's Actually Closed Right Now, and Why There Are Two Projects Happening at Once
If your drive to City Market or downtown has felt slower this year, it's worth knowing you're navigating two separate projects that happen to overlap on the same stretch of highway. The first is the Highway 340 resurfacing between Redlands Parkway and Grand Avenue, an overnight lane-closure job that's kept Alcove Drive closed at 23 Road for the duration, with Vista Grande Road and Columbine Drive standing in as the detour. The second is the roundabout itself, where crews built the north side first and shifted traffic to the south, then flipped that sequence this fall, moving operations to the south side and shifting through-traffic to the north. Access to 23 Road south of Highway 340 has been limited to local residents, and stretches of South Broadway near the intersection have seen temporary closures and shifting patterns as the two projects have run in parallel.
None of this is permanent. Highway 340 stays open to two-way traffic for nearly all of the roundabout project, with only intermittent stretches reduced to a single lane for flagging operations. The resurfacing work between Redlands Parkway and Grand Avenue keeps its own 35 mph limit through that work zone, but that's a separate crew on a separate schedule. The fall handoff at 23 Road, the exact phase happening right now, is the one most likely to catch regular drivers off guard, since it reverses which side of the road carries through-traffic without much visual warning beyond new cone placement.
| Project | What's happening this fall | Where the detour lives |
|---|---|---|
| Highway 340 resurfacing (Redlands Parkway to Grand Avenue) | Overnight lane closures, 7 p.m. to 7 a.m., weekdays | Alcove Drive closed at 23 Road; use Vista Grande Road or Columbine Drive |
| Broadway and 23 Road roundabout | Crews shift from north-side to south-side construction, moving through-traffic to the north | 23 Road south of Highway 340 limited to local residents |
The Trails Were the Original Deal, and the Developer Knows It
Long before Redlands 360 was a construction zone, that same 600 acres was informal open space, crossed by social trails that hikers and mountain bikers had been using for years with the landowner's tacit permission. That history is part of why La Plata Communities, the project's developer, brought in the Mesa County Trails Coordinator to identify which of those routes were worth keeping and formalizing rather than paving over.
"We're trying to be good neighbors and good partners. People have been good stewards of this land."
That's Jane Quimby, the local representative for La Plata Communities, describing the approach. The new road, called Brothers Boulevard, extends west toward the Easter Hill section of the development and had to go in before any additional housing phases could move forward. Running utilities and grading that road was costly, but it was the piece that let the next phase of houses proceed.
What comes next, specifically, is a phase called 4H Peaks: 47 new homesites below Easter Hill, with the underlying infrastructure going in this year and homes going vertical this fall, meaning framing is happening on that hillside right now if you drive past it. Separately, at the development's northwest corner near South Broadway and South Camp Road, plans call for 125 townhomes in two phases, with the first 46 units potentially breaking ground this fall as well. Whether that timeline holds exactly is the kind of detail that shifts with weather and permitting, but the direction is not in question. This corridor is adding rooflines on a schedule measured in months, not years.
A Different Kind of Construction Down the Road
While all that heavy engineering has been unfolding at the top of the mesa, a much smaller and quieter project has been underway at the bottom of it. The Redlands Community Center, the 106-year-old building on Broadway that started life in 1920 as Grand Junction's country club before becoming the longtime home of the Redlands Women's Club, has spent this year raising money for basic upkeep: refinishing its original floors and repainting the wooden arch that's become the building's signature. It was added to the Colorado Historical Society Register back in 1994, and it's been hosting weddings, graduation parties, and bridal showers for longer than almost anyone currently driving past the roundabout has been alive.
Lynda VanGarvee, who's helped care for the building for the past three years, held a craft fair in April to help fund the repairs, framing the center's role in terms that have nothing to do with roundabouts or homesites.
"Redlands community is here for all of the people in the valley, not just Redlands, but for all over the valley."
It's a useful contrast to sit with. One end of the neighborhood is absorbing a multimillion-dollar infrastructure project engineered for population growth that hasn't fully arrived yet. The other end is being kept standing by volunteers repainting an arch by hand. Both are investments in the same half mile of road. Neither one makes sense without the other.
What This Actually Means If You Live Here
None of this changes what it feels like to live in the Redlands day to day, at least not yet. The golf courses are still there, Lunch Loops still draws mountain bikers across from Monument Road, and Ocotillo still pours the same view of the National Monument it always has. What's changed is the math underneath the neighborhood. A development that spent two decades as informal open space is now a platted, permitted, 1,300-home project with a city-engineered entrance, and the fall you're driving through is the point where that math becomes visible from the driver's seat.
If you're watching the framing go up on 4H Peaks or wondering what a corridor built for 1,300 more neighbors does to your own home's position in the market, that's a conversation worth having sooner rather than later. The Agency Grand Junction offers a free home valuation for anyone in the Redlands who wants a clear read on where their property stands as this corridor fills in.
