Steamboat Springs — Concrete trucks were busy Monday afternoon pouring the foundation for a new two-story, 15,000-square-foot mixed use commercial building on the north side of U.S. Highway 40 on the west side of Steamboat Springs.

West End Plaza was approved administratively by the city of Steamboat Springs early in the summer. It is expected to house Columbine Granite on its ground floor and will offer five more spaces averaging about 2,060 square feet on two levels, although those spaces may be configured differently to suit the needs of purchasers.

Developer Stacey Bumgarner said Monday the new building, which she hopes will be completed by March 31, 2016, could be the first of two or three more to be developed on nearby land, completing the West End Plaza office park. Utility work is being done this fall in anticipation of the additional building projects to follow.

“It’s exciting,” Bumgarner said. “This is the first commercial project to be built (on the city’s west side) in quite a long time.”

Future uses could include offices, showrooms, retail for primarily commercial customers and more.

The first tenant will be Bumgarner’s own business, Columbine Granite.

The construction site is immediately west of NAPA Auto Parts and located at the foot of a steep hillside beneath the West End Village residential neighborhood.

City Planner Toby Stauffer said Monday that no public hearings were needed to approve the project because it required neither variances nor conditional uses. However, Bumgarner did go through the public process to gain permission for a temporary 640-square-foot building for the the granite business.

The development entity is WTG Ventures, LLC. Bob Childers of CCH Inc. is the general contractor. Architect Bill Rangitsch of Steamboat Architectural Associates designed the building, and Loui Antonucci of Keller Williams Steamboat Realty is the listing broker.

Columbine Granite sells granite that it picks up in slab form in Denver and processes to customers’ specifications in its shop in Steamboat. About 75 percent of the customers are wholesale/contractors and the remaining 25 percent are residential clients.

To reach Tom Ross, call 970-871-4205, email tross@SteamboatToday.com or follow him on Twitter @ThomasSRoss1