Tower harbor

For the first time in a long while, there is cautious optimism that major development will finally come to Tower’s harbor, including a variety of residential options as well as about 7,500 feet of commercial space. The proposal is fully in keeping with the city’s longtime vision for a walkable, mixed-use community at the harbor.
The construction firm, Pine City- based Eagle Ridge LLC, has signed an agreement with the Tower Economic Development Authority that gives them until June of next year to begin construction, although the company’s principal, Cole Newman, says he expects to begin construction by June of this year. That’s an aggressive timeline but Eagle Ridge is moving quickly to get all the pieces in place.
The city’s planning and zoning commission gave the green light this week to advance the firm’s conditional use permit application to the required public hearing, and approval is highly likely. They’ve also commissioned detailed renderings of the planned buildings for the TEDA board to review. The development agreement gives TEDA the right to approve the design, but it appears there is already substantial agreement on the look of the project. The planned three-story, commercial/apartment building, to be built on the southeast end of the harbor, across from the Hwy. 169 bridge, would be the most prominent building in the city once completed and will create an impressive backdrop to the harbor itself.
Once the parties have agreed on final plans, they will execute a purchase agreement, which could happen as early as next month. TEDA is also working to find the grant dollars to fund the needed streets and utilities.
The developers, TEDA, and the city, have been working through the many questions and details that such a project inevitably entails, ranging from zoning, to platting, to permitting.
While the city has had agreements with developers before, this is already the furthest along that any project has come so far and that’s helped by the fact that Eagle Ridge has considerable experience in bringing forward successful projects. City officials in Pine City, where Eagle Ridge has completed two apartment projects in the past few years, gave the company high marks for following through on their promises and completing quality projects.
We know there will be some skepticism out there, and given the history of on-again, off-again projects at the harbor, caution is certainly warranted. But the factors that stymied previous projects at the harbor have been largely resolved. TEDA now has clear title to the property thanks to a costly, three-year process by the city to address longstanding title conflicts. Hopefully, some of the national economic challenges that caused other delays can be avoided this time.
One thing that is certain is that city officials and others associated with hopes for the harbor have learned some lessons the hard way over the years. Even big cities can struggle with major development projects, and that can be much harder in a small town like Tower, where those charged with shepherding such projects typically have little to no previous experience with development, much less the time to devote to seeing it through. That forces small communities to turn to costly consultants or engineers for expertise, which can put communities in a financial bind. That was certainly the case with the city of Tower in the past, which spent more than a million dollars on consultants and engineers to advance the harbor project, which ultimately left the city in a financial crisis. From the beginning, the city’s vision for the harbor was ambitious, perhaps more ambitious than a small community could reasonably expect to deliver.
That’s true, in part, because any such development requires significant private investment, and that’s difficult to attract in a small community, where many investors assume that they can’t achieve the returns possible in a larger city.
In the past, small communities could turn to federal sources of funding for new housing, which helped build apartments in places like Tower, Soudan, Ely, Cook, and Orr decades ago. But those sources of funding have been gradually disappearing and are likely to disappear altogether given the current priorities in Washington, D.C. That will make small communities all the more dependent on private investment capital to create major development projects.
If anything, the history of the efforts to develop Tower’s harbor demonstrates the need for patience when it comes to economic growth in a small town. After two decades laying the groundwork for development, including addressing the conflicting titles to the property, the city of Tower needed the right combination of experience and financial wherewithal to move a major project forward. It looks like the city may have finally found a partner and a project that has the potential to fulfill the city’s original vision for the harbor. While there are still potential hurdles, patience may have finally paid off. Time will tell.