Wolford project headed to planning board

Glacier Town Center is now officially in Kalispell's bureaucratic pipeline.

That's the latest name of the commercial project that has been pursued by Tennessee developer Bucky Wolford for the past seven years north of Kalispell. The project was originally proposed as a mall, but opposition groups eventually convinced Wolford to switch his development to a mix of box stores, smaller retail, homes and open space.

Wolford formally filed an application for annexation for his property north of Reserve Drive on Monday, and it is expected to go before the Kalispell Planning Board on Nov. 13.

The application includes requests for various types of business and residential zoning for the 485-acre site, plus for planned unit developments in which some zoning restrictions would be relaxed in return for mitigating measures.

Monday's application also included a preliminary plan for the 192-acre first phase - which is the commercial centerpiece of the project, including a 58-acre "lifestyle center" that is essentially an outdoors shopping center with a park-like ambiance.

The overall chunk of land is a peninsula of proposed incorporated area extending north into rural Flathead County from West Reserve Drive, connecting with three other recently annexed parcels.

All four chunks together would send a 1.7-square-mile crooked finger of Kalispell up to Church Drive - three miles north of West Reserve Drive, which is more or less the border of the main chunk of Kalispell.

The site'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 multiple-family buildings are to be 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, of which the first will be overwhelming commercial buildings - a total of 36 lots - with some park space.

The first homes would be a few built in the second phase that is scheduled to run from 2010 to 2013. However, the second phase will be primarily commercial construction between the lifestyle center in the middle of the site and West Reserve Drive.

The last three phases are scheduled to be built from 2014 to 2020.

All five phases are set to hold 72 acres of parks.

Meanwhile at a Monday workshop session - at which no votes were legally allowed - Kalispell's City Council took a bus tour of key development sites, with City Manager Jim Patrick and City Planning Director Tom Jentz briefing them on what is under way elsewhere in the town.

Patrick and Jentz said:

. The Hilton Garden hotel complex expects to eventually set up a parking lot for airplanes landing at neighboring Kalispell City Airport.

. Whenever the city airport extends the runway 1,000 feet to the south, that would bump the airport next to a 7.5-acre old city landfill site. That landfill would be a good site for a terminal, Patrick proposed.

. Northwest Drywall and Cenex are looking at moving their businesses from the downtown area - adjacent to the railroad tracks the city wants to remove - to somewhere else. Potential sites include the Kalispell Pole Yard in Evergreen or the intersection of Rose Crossing and U.S. 2.

. A Kohl's department store, McDonald's, Taco Bell and Grease Monkey are considering moving into empty spots just west of U.S. 93 and south of West Reserve Drive in Phase 3 of Spring Prairie Center.

. The 139-acre Willow Creek project - on which the Kalispell Planning Board has turned thumbs down a few times for cramming too much into the site just southwest of Kalispell - is expected to return soon to the planning department with fewer homes than proposed before.

. Within the next few months, developer Bill Wynne is expected to seek annexation for 86 acres along the west side of the Kidsport athletic complex to build a few hundred homes.

. Other developers are researching other housing projects to see if they want to seek annexation.

Reporter John Stang may be reached at 758-4429 or by e-mail at jstang@dailyinterlake.com