Heber City Council heard yet another annexation petition at Tuesday evening’s council meeting. The North Village Crossing Annexation could potentially bring retail, apartments and a movie theatre near the intersection of US 40 and River Road.
The North Village Crossing Annexation is almost 140 acres located at the southeast and southwest corners of River Road and US 40. The developers signed a 25-year development agreement with Wasatch County in 2013, the plan allows for 730 equivalent residential units and 487,000 square feet of retail.
Bruce Barrett is the owner of the North Village Resort project, and the planner for the Crossing project. He says 45,000 vehicles a day will travel through the area, so he plans to build mostly retail and office space. Preliminary projections by city staff show a $1.6 million net positive impact on the city’s budget.
“We believe that this is actually a potential for the city to have a tremendous amount of income to offset the tremendous amount of residential that’s going in, in the Views and Highlands and Sorenson,” Barrett said. “Could be a pretty major economic impact for the city going forward. The area definitely needs movie theater, it needs some more retail on that intersection.”
The annexation also includes a resort area where Barrett says they plan to build condos that discourage full-time residency. Barrett says the timeline of their buildout is deponent entirely on demand.
“We're not building anything ahead of sales,” Barrett explained. “The buildout on this property it could take 15 years. It could take 20 years. It’s going to take however long it takes for it to make financial sense. We're certainly not going to build units ahead of time before selling them. We're not going to build units that don't get rented, that have low occupancies, that's not going to happen.”
Barrett forecasts buildout to be seven to twelve years, partially because of their proximity to the planned Mayflower Mountain Resort. Barrett says phase one includes one or two condo buildings, half a dozen townhomes, retail buildings, a restaurant the theatre and a gas station. Council asked about the visual impacts of the convenience store.
“The gas station will be screened,” Barrett continued. “It’s my opinion that it will not be visually impactful. I actually can model these up in 3-D as we go over the next few months so that you can see the visual impact at anywhere along the road. If the council thought that it was too negative of an impact, we could actually remove it and replace it with retail.”
Barrett added that the traffic coming from Midway could really benefit from the station.
Heber City Council voted 4-1 to move forward with the application process, with Heidi Franco voting against. The vote did not approve the annexation but allows the petitioners and the city to move forward with their discussions.
