Junction Commons got votes of approval from the Snyderville Basin Planning Commission Feb. 24 for its redevelopment proposal.
The outlet mall in Kimball Junction has long sought to diversify its tenants from just retail to restaurants, too. Now it’s looking to add housing and become a mixed-use community.
But as with any housing proposal near Interstate 80 and state Route 224, adding car traffic to an already congested area concerned the planning commission.
And although Commissioner Eric Sagerman agreed the project should be forwarded to the Summit County Council, he said he wanted to make sure they looked at it in context.
“[Junction Commons is] adjacent to another development that's having 700 or more units, in addition to the hotel that's going, or whatever occurs in the [Utah] Olympic Park,” he said. “We're not adding one new road or looking at a traffic study that actually takes into account all of those together.”
Justin Keys, an attorney for Junction Commons owner Singerman Real Estate, said what makes the proposal different from the others is that it’s a redevelopment.
“This isn't greenfield development. It's not all brand new cars, right?” the lawyer said. “We're taking nearly 100,000 square feet of commercial off right away, which takes a lot of demand off the roads right away.”
The development plan would knock down the center’s upper loop of stores and replace them with 433 units of housing, including 42 townhomes. The rest are apartments split between three buildings, one of which will have a clubhouse and recreation space.
Nine buildings would fill in the lower loop’s parking lot with 54,000 square feet of commercial space on the ground floors and 77 total apartments above.
It requires a rezone to Summit County’s NMU-1, or neighborhood mixed-use zone, and Junction Commons would be the first successful NMU-1 rezone.
Commissioners voted 6-1 to forward it to the county council with a positive recommendation. Tim Jeffrey dissented, saying it was simply too big.
But his colleagues added a condition: the project’s traffic mitigation planning should take the future Dakota Pacific Real Estate and Utah Olympic Park developments into consideration.
Another condition is making three of the 42 townhomes affordable so that the affordable apartments don’t seem segregated from market rate townhomes.
The NMU-1 zone requires half the housing to be affordable, but it allows Junction Commons to build fewer if it builds the affordable units first.
Now the project goes to the county council for another public hearing and final determination on its rezone and master plan. A date for that hearing hasn’t been set.
Click here for the planning commission staff report.
Junction Commons is a financial supporter of KPCW.
