Fort Collins, Colo., is moving forward with a major rehabilitation of Fossil Creek along a degraded stretch through the city's rapidly developed south side, the latest step in a roughly 20-year push to turn battered urban waterways into functioning ecosystems.
The project targets Fossil Creek between Trilby Road and Lemay Avenue, a corridor transformed from farmland into suburban subdivisions and commercial strips over roughly two decades beginning in the 1990s. That kind of rapid development typically leaves streams in rough shape: channels cut deeper into the ground, banks erode, native vegetation disappears, and stormwater runoff degrades water quality. The Fossil Creek stretch through this area has experienced all of it.
The city is now hiring a Construction Manager/General Contractor to help redesign the reach, a process that typically involves reshaping the channel, reconnecting the stream to its floodplain, stabilizing banks, and replanting native vegetation. The goal is to rebuild the kind of stream that can absorb heavy rainfall, filter runoff and support wildlife, rather than just move water downstream toward the Cache la Poudre River as fast as possible. The city posted the solicitation on BidNet Direct on Oct. 2, 2026. The project budget and timeline have not been publicly disclosed.
The urgency behind this work traces back to September 2013, when catastrophic floods killed 10 people and caused roughly $4 billion in damage across the Colorado Front Range, including significant destruction in Larimer County. That disaster pushed cities like Fort Collins to rethink how they manage their waterways, blending flood protection with habitat restoration rather than treating them as separate problems.
Fossil Creek runs near the popular Fossil Creek Trail and Fossil Creek Reservoir Natural Area, so the project will be visible to the many residents and cyclists who use that corridor regularly. Fort Collins has completed similar restoration work on Spring Creek and earlier reaches of Fossil Creek, part of a broader stream rehabilitation program funded through the city's stormwater utility and a dedicated natural areas sales tax that voters have renewed several times since 1992.
With Colorado's climate delivering increasingly sharp swings between drought and extreme precipitation, the pressure to get these projects done is growing. How quickly this stretch of Fossil Creek gets its turn depends on the contractor selection process now underway.
