First look at Wolford plan due Tuesday
The Daily Inter Lake
The Kalispell Planning Board will take its first look Tuesday at the Glacier Town Center project.
That look will take place at a workshop session - at which no votes are legally allowed - following the board's regular 7 p.m. meeting.
Developer Bucky Wolford filed an annexation request in September for the 485-acre site north of West Reserve Drive.
The application includes requests for various types of business and residential zoning, plus planned unit developments in which some zoning would be relaxed in return for mitigating measures.
The application also includes a preliminary plan for the 192-acre first phase - the commercial centerpiece of the project.
It includes a 58-acre "lifestyle center" that is essentially an outdoors shopping center with a park-like ambiance.
Originally planned as an enclosed indoors shopping center to be known as Glacier Mall, the project was changed to the lifestyle center and renamed Glacier Town Center as part of a settlement of a legal challenge to Flathead County's approval process for Glacier Mall.
The project also switched jurisdictions from the county to the city of Kalispell with Wolford's annexation application.
Wolford began his quest for the project in January 2000.
Glacier Town Center's plans call for 282 single-family houses, 350 homes in multiple-family units, and 1.823 million square feet of office and commercial space to be built by 2020.
The 350 homes in multlple-family buildings are divided into 150 townhouses and 200 apartments.
The proposed single-family houses include 147 on lots of 6,000 to 7,000 square feet, 115 on lots of 7,000 to 9,000 square feet and 20 on quarter-acre lots.
The project has five construction phases, with the first phase overwhelmingly commercial buildings - a total of 36 lots - plus some park space.
Much of the first phase is earmarked to be built by 2009 if the submitted plans meet with city government approval.
The first homes would be built as part of the second phase scheduled to run from 2010 to 2013. However, the second phase is earmarked to be primarily commercial construction between the lifestyle center and West Reserve Drive.
The last three phases are scheduled to be built from 2014 to 2020.
All five phases are supposed to hold 72 acres of parks.
During Tuesday's regular meeting, the Planning Board is scheduled to hold a public hearing on whether to install single-family housing zoning on 24.5 acres of the 164.5-acre Willow Creek housing site, which also is seeking annexation.
The board already has recommended single-family housing zoning for the remaining part of the site when it is annexed to southwestern Kalispell.
Developers Wayne and Hubert Turner also are returning with a new preliminary plan for the site calling for 531 homes - a drop from the 580 homes the board rejected earlier. Originally, the Turners sought 710 homes.
The latest plan calls for 361 single-family lots, 18 townhouse lots and 15 buildings holding up to 152 condominiums.