Logan County EDC seeks grants to buy former Sterling Sugar Mill land

Securing part of the former Sterling Sugar Mill site could decide whether one of Sterling’s largest industrial properties becomes a job-creating asset, a tax-generating redevelopment, or a long-running vacant tract on the city’s edge. The Logan County Economic Development Corporation is now trying to line up grant money to help buy some of the land tied to the site, a step that signals local leaders want more control over what happens there next.

Trae Miller, the organization’s executive director, laid out the effort during a Tuesday work session. Miller has led LCEDC since 2015, and the corporation says it was formed in 2001 to expand the economic base of Logan County. Its stated work includes business retention and expansion, recruitment, infrastructure development, and helping projects secure financing along with local, state, federal and private grants. In this case, the grant strategy appears designed to reduce the amount of local money needed to take control of the property.

That matters because the former sugar mill is no ordinary vacant lot. The Sterling Sugar Company built the plant in 1905, and its original 600-ton-per-day capacity eventually grew to 2,175 tons per day by 1960. Great Western later acquired the facility, and in 1987 it sold the building, 327 acres of land and water rights to Lee and Marlene Roth. The site was later converted to beet storage for the working factory in Fort Morgan after the plant shut down in the 1980s, and parts of the complex have been reused as warehouse space. Even so, much of the property has sat vacant for nearly 40 years.

The land sits in Sterling, the Logan County seat, in a county that LCEDC describes as a regional hub for about 70,000 people on Colorado’s High Plains. Sterling itself has about 14,104 residents, and the county’s remaining sugar-industry footprint makes the former mill especially significant. Colorado’s sugar beet industry once anchored much of the state’s economy, but Fort Morgan is now the only factory still operating. That leaves the Sterling site as one of the region’s most visible redevelopment opportunities, and one of the most important pieces of land-use questions facing Logan County now.