LOVELAND - The withdrawal of the Aerospace and Clean Energy initiative from Loveland centered on a disagreement over how many small tenants or whether just a few large companies should fill the old Agilent Technologies plant, city officials said Friday.

Betsey Hale, the city's economic development director, said tenants would have ended up paying too much to lease space under plans by the Colorado Association for Manufacturing and Technology to fill the plant with "hundreds of companies."

"The business model of trying to re-tenant the property with multiple, potentially even hundreds of companies, and also have about 100,000 square feet of shared services space, was not a realistic model," she said.

The plant, she explained, would have to be reconfigured into smaller, individual spaces to accommodate so many companies. Those upgrades would have driven up the cost of rehabbing the plant and driven up lease rate so much that few companies would have been able to afford the rent.

CAMT announced its withdrawal Thursday. The 811,000-square-foot plant plant is owned by Kentucky-based Cumberland and Western Resources. CAMT will now look for a new home for ACE, probably in the Denver-Boulder area.