I stopped in to visit Heather Geyer, the city manager in Northglenn, Colorado — a community of about 39,000 people just north of Denver. I thought I was stopping in for a good conversation. I was not prepared for what was waiting inside that building.

I have been to a lot of city halls. A lot. And Northglenn's new City Hall — which opened in September 2024 — is genuinely unlike anything I have walked into before. This is not a building you visit and think "oh, that's nice." This is a building you walk out of still thinking about two days later.

Here's why.

The moment you step into the lobby, you stop. Above you, suspended from the ceiling in a soaring two-story atrium, is a massive sculpture of steel and glass — four native Colorado trees, each one representing a season, their two-dimensional trunks rising up the walls and turning three-dimensional as they reach the ceiling, branches mixing and intertwining across the space. It was commissioned by the Northglenn Arts & Humanities Foundation and created by Colorado sculptor Jodie Bliss. It is breathtaking. And it is not decorative for decoration's sake — it is the first statement this building makes about what it believes. Nature. Community. The living world that connects us all.

That theme does not stop at the lobby.

The conference rooms in this building are each designed around a season — and the designers meant it. The fall conference room has orange glass. You are not just in a room named "Autumn." You are immersed in it. The light changes. The environment changes. Every material, every design choice, every surface in this building was chosen to connect the people inside it to the natural world outside.

They call it biophilic design — architecture that seeks to close the gap between humans and nature. In Northglenn, they did not just nod at the concept. They built a whole building around it. Even the landscape outside is designed to reflect the native ecology of the Colorado high plains.

And then there are the Council Chambers.

The city council of Northglenn, Colorado sits down to make decisions — zoning, budgets, policies, the things that shape the daily lives of 39,000 people — and directly in their sightline, visible through the windows from the council dais, is the Veterans Memorial. That placement was not an accident. It was one of the first and most intentional design decisions made by the Anderson Mason Dale architectural team, and it anchors everything about this building.

Think about what that means. Every single council meeting begins with a visual reminder of sacrifice. Of service. Of something bigger than the agenda item in front of you. In a moment when local democracy has never been more important — when the role of local government as the front line of democratic accountability has never been more clear — this building is making a statement every time the council convenes. You are here to serve. This is what service costs. Don't forget what you are here for.

That is not just good design. That is moral architecture.

The building itself is a first-of-its-kind in Colorado. It is net zero — 476 solar panels on the roof and canopy generate as much energy as the building uses annually. It is built with mass timber construction, reducing embodied carbon by 41 percent. About one-fifth of the building materials were sourced within 310 miles. It is on track to become the first municipal building in Colorado — and one of the first in the country — to achieve CORE Green Building certification from the International Living Future Institute. That is a higher bar than LEED Platinum. It measures actual building performance, not just design intent.

Northglenn did not build a green building. They built a regenerative one.

And all of it — the art, the seasonal rooms, the sightlines, the sustainability — flows from one question that Heather and her team and their council asked at the very beginning of this project: What do we want this building to say about who we are?

The answer they gave is worth the drive to see.

To Learn More: Visit Northglenn City Hall at 11701 Community Center Drive, Northglenn, CO 80233 (https://www.northglenn.org/government/city_hall.php)

About Ron on the Road

Ron Holifield speaks to over 2,000 local government officials annually and has coffee with over 250 local government officials each year as part of his travels. If you have a cool site you think he should visit, email Ron@CivicMarketplace.com. 

NOTE: This column was written with the assistance of Melissa Valentine, senior director of operations and support at Civic Marketplace. 

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