The City of Clearwater is looking ahead.

 

At the March meeting, the council gave Administrator Kevin Kress and Engineer Joe Pelawa from Bolton & Menk the go-ahead to put together a cost estimate for creating a developer’s document.

 

Kress said he and the engineer had discussed having something in place to give developers a guide to city requirements.

 

“It’s something I’d like to put together as sort of a work manual,” said Kress. “That’s something we didn’t have for Kwik Trip.”

 

Kress said the city wasn’t prepared when Kwik Trip decided to locate a station/store in the city just south of I-94. City staff had to work with Quick Trip to design a number of items in their site plan. He said a developer’s manual would have helped.

 

“When a developer comes in, everything is black and white,” he said. “It’s a document that would answer 99% of the questions we get.”

 

Pelawa said he has done a similar manual for other cities. He said there are a lot components to the document, but it’s worth the time and expense to have in place because it saves city staff time and helps developers know up-front what the process is.

 

“There’s a lot of little pieces. It’s not only the developers’ checklist. There’s also planning issues,” he said. “If a developer comes in, there’s certain steps laid out.”

 

He said a developer’s first contact might be talking to city staff and bringing a concept or a sketch.

 

“This book would facilitate initial communications,” he said.

 

Pelawa said there are a number of steps a developer has to know about, like getting certain types of approvals from the county and MnDOT and following city zoning rules.

 

“Another component is engineering. If you come into our community we want you to design your access road to a 10-ton standard,” he said. “We want your storm sewer pipes in the right-of-way or within roads the city is going to take over to be constructed to certain standards.”

 

He said with such a document, any developer coming into the community would have a general knowledge of construction standards, like the type of catch basins and hydrants, type of curbs and storm water rates.

 

“Clearwater doesn’t quite have any of that stuff in place, other than what has been done in the past,” said Pelawa. “It’s all the little things you really don’t think about until all of a sudden you have the Kwik Trip site and we had all these gaps.”

 

Pelawa said the city’s planner would have to be involved, as would the parks commission, because the city might decide to modify some of the standards already covered in city zoning ordinances. He said the council may decide to revise some ordinances once they agree on new standards.

 

“We might need to add  language to the ordinances to force developers to utilize it,” he said.

 

Kress said he would work with Pelawa to put together a cost for the document.