Support the Timberjay by making a donation.

Serving Northern St. Louis County, Minnesota

TOWER HARBOR

Townhouse start slated for next year

Marshall Helmberger
Posted 5/5/16

TOWER—Barring a miracle, construction on the planned townhouses on the harbor here won’t begin until midsummer 2017. That was the consensus of the Tower Harbor Committee, which met on …

This item is available in full to subscribers.

Please log in to continue

Log in
TOWER HARBOR

Townhouse start slated for next year

Posted

TOWER—Barring a miracle, construction on the planned townhouses on the harbor here won’t begin until midsummer 2017. That was the consensus of the Tower Harbor Committee, which met on Monday.

The new timeline is not so much a delay as it is a more realistic assessment of how long it will take the city to deliver on its portions of the project, including new roads and utilities. That work can’t proceed until the developer, Tower Vision 2025 LLC, has financing in place and has firmly committed to move forward with the project.

Jeremy Schoenfelder, a real estate consultant who is part of the team working on the project, said marketing is already underway, but pre-sales and financing likely won’t be in place before later in the summer. And that is almost certainly too late for the city of Tower to complete design, bidding, and construction of its needed project components before winter.

That would push completion of the work into spring and early summer of next year, clearing the way for the start of construction on the townhouses after that.

City officials anticipate that their portion of the project will be funded from a variety of sources, including IRRRB, the Department of Employment and Economic Development, and St. Louis County. The IRRRB has already added $350,000 for the project in its fiscal year that begins July 1, according to consultant Gary Lamppa, of Community Resource Development (CRD). “The money is going to be there,” Lamppa added.

Much of Monday’s meeting was spent discussing the finer details of the project. Schoenfelder said he needed clarification of several issues to finalize cost estimates for the units. He said the development team is close to finalizing a deal with Kraus-Anderson to serve as the general contractor for the project and should have cost estimates and sale prices for individual units within two weeks.

Schoenfelder also had questions about long-term maintenance of the site, such as snowplowing and grass mowing, as well as docking. The city is looking to build and lease dock slips and Schoenfelder wanted to know the likely cost for slip rental, since it would all be part of the overall cost of purchasing and maintaining a townhouse unit. While buyers won’t have to rent dock space, the developers assume that most will want to do so.

With the details beginning to fall into place, Tower Vision 2025 is now working with Tower-based Janisch Realty on pre-sales of its units. The development firm is hoping to have at least ten of the 20 units in the project pre-sold before it goes for financing. Schoenfelder said he expects to have the sales in place within two to three months, and arranging financing after that would likely take six more weeks to complete.

Locating a general contractor proved more difficult than Schoenfelder had anticipated. “There’s a lot of litigation over town home projects,” he said, mostly over warranty issues. He said a few law firms in Minnesota have come to specialize in suing over warranty issues, no matter how minor, and it has prompted most general contractors to avoid shared ownership projects.

Downtown

redevelopment

The harbor committee took a detour for an update on the proposal by Bob Bremer for redevelopment of several vacant or abandoned lots on the city’s Main Street. Bremer had been scheduled to attend Monday’s meeting, but changed his mind out of concern that he hasn’t gotten all the information he had hoped to get from city officials.

“He called me and had some concerns about how the whole redevelopment process is proceeding,” said Dick Grabko, Lamppa’s partner at CRD. “He really doesn’t feel he’s had the information he needs and I’m worried this is falling between the cracks.”

“He remains strongly committed to doing the projects,” said Grabko. “But we need to more clearly define this.”

Grabko suggested that he and Lamppa work directly with Bremer in crafting a redevelopment plan that would encompass all of Main Street and that would open up a variety of federal and state funding possibilities. “I think the first thing we need to do is to establish that redevelopment district. That provides a clearer path for redevelopment funding. There are some really good funding streams, combinations of federal and state grant and loan programs.”

Grabko said the city first needs a legal opinion to determine if the city’s Main Street meets the statutory guidelines for creating a redevelopment district. “We need to do that if we’re serious and it can be done quickly and inexpensively,” he said. “That really sets the table for the whole downtown redevelopment concept.”

Grabko and Lamppa will be coming forward with a redevelopment plan in the next several weeks and will likely be working with the new Main Street Committee, which the city council appointed in January. Current members of the committee are Joan Broten, Marshall Helmberger, and Steve Peterson, although the city is expected to look for one or two additional members.

Grabko said it will likely take a couple months to finalize the plan and that the city could meet more productively with Bremer at that point. Grabko said the work could be completed under the city’s current contract with CRD and would cost the city nothing additional.