Three anchor stores planned at new center

A public hearing on the Glacier Town Center project at the north end of Kalispell is set for Nov. 27.

The Kalispell Planning Board will hold the hearing at 7 p.m. at the Earl Bennett Building in Kalispell before pondering whether to recommend that the City Council approve annexing the site along with a preliminary plan for its first phase.

Chad Wolford and the project's planning team briefed the board Tuesday on the project.

Tennesee-based Wolford Development filed an annexation request in September for the 485-acre site north of West Reserve Drive and east of U.S. 93.

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 project has earmarked 327 acres for commercial use and 158 acres for mixed business and residential use. The application also includes a preliminary plan for the 192-acre first phase ? the commercial centerpiece of the project.

It includes a 577,000-square-foot "lifestyle center" that is essentially an outdoors shopping center with a mountain-oriented ambiance on 58 acres.

That center is to be anchored by three store buildings of roughly 100,000 square feet each. By comparison, the Costco building in northern Kalispell is about 136,000 square feet. Chad Wolford declined Tuesday to name potential anchor store tenants.

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.

Glacier Town Center's plans call for 282 single-family houses, 150 townhouses and 200 apartments, and 1.823 million square feet of office and commercial space to be built over the next 20 years.

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 being overwhelmingly commercial buildings ? a total of 36 lots ? plus some park space. All five phases are supposed to hold 72 acres of parks.

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, along with a huge store building just north of West Reserve Drive. Wolford said plans for that spot are still in the initial brainstorming stage. The second phase is earmarked to be primarily commercial construction between the lifestyle center and West Reserve Drive.

He said a grocery store, which northern Kalispell does not have, would be a good fit in the overall project. Right now, no grocery chain has said it would open a store in that area.

The planning board's greatest concerns Tuesday were:

? How the roads into Glacier Town Center will connect with highways and lands surrounding it.

? Whether the lifestyle center has a good plan for handling pedestrian traffic.

? Whether the project's outdoors lights can be controlled so they don't create a huge blotch of urban light against the dark night skies.

The board's biggest worry was traffic.

One road will connect the center with West Reserve Drive.

Two arterial roads are envisioned so far to connect the center with Whitefish Stage Road to the east. That includes extending Rose Crossing west to reach the lifestyle center.

To the north is a bigger and fuzzier concern.

The already annexed Valley Ranch housing subdivision ? which still needs its plans approved by the city ? is there. The Planning Board and likely the City Council will want connecting roads between the two projects to dilute traffic volumes elsewhere and provide extra access for emergency vehicles.

Kalispell's city government is making a big push on streets "connectivity" being part of all of its annexations and construction projects.

But "connectivity" bumps into another opposing city stance to the west on U.S. 93.

Kalispell's government wants to keep traffic lights and intersections to a minimum on U.S. 93 to keep a fast traffic flow between the town and Whitefish.

That creates a clash between the city wanting fast U.S. 93 traffic and the city wanting a sufficient number of connecting roads.

"We fought so hard for a four-lane [U.S. 93 north] and now it might be possibly jammed with lights," board member Rick Hull said.

Board chairman Bryan Schutt said southbound traffic will be a major dilemma in connecting U.S. 93 with Glacier Town Center. He fretted about left turns by southbound traffic.

"If you do it as an unprotected intersection, people will die with regularity. If you do it with lights, people will be backed up for a mile," Schutt said.

The Wolford team has been talking with the Montana Department of Transportation about the best way to connect U.S. 93 with Glacier Town Center, but it has not received any answers yet from the state.

Valley Ranch and two other parcels of land north and northwest of Glacier Town Center were annexed earlier this year ? forming an "island" of incorporated land surrounded by rural Flathead County.

If Glacier Town Center is annexed, it would connect that "island" to the main part of Kalispell. That would create a 1.7 square mile crooked finger of Kalispell sticking north of West Reserve Drive into the county, zigzagging across U.S. 93. Glacier Town Center would make up about 45 percent of that 1.7 square mile.

For more on this story, see Thursday's Daily Inter Lake.