Proposed road meets first hurdle with approval of preliminary plat

Ralph Pokorny

Barry Clark's plan to build a new road south from Austin Boulevard to open property he owns between Austin and Wal-Mart for commercial development passed its first hurdle Tuesday afternoon when the Nevada Planning Commission approved the preliminary plat for the road.

"The Missouri Department of Transportation has conceptually approved the location of the road, but we are waiting for the final play to submit to MoDOT," Barry Clark told the commission.

"They've generally been in favor to this for two or three years," Clark said.

The proposed road will be located several hundred feet east of the Barrett Street intersection and will run south to where it will intersect with Lincoln Avenue. At some time in the future the city hopes to extend Lincoln Avenue to the east to provide access to a proposed outer belt road if U.S. Highway 71 is ever upgraded to Interstate status.

Wal-Mart built 400 feet of Lincoln Avenue east from Barrett Street as part of their development agreement with the city when they built the Supercenter.

Clark told the commission at their March 10 meeting that the road would be used to access property where he wants to build a 28,000 square foot shopping center that he estimates will generate $4 to $5 million annually in sales.

At that time he said that he was currently in negotiations with a national restaurant chain and other businesses that were interested in locating in the shopping center.

Clark told the commission Tuesday when he is finished the area should look better.

"Bill's Tire & Truck are contractually obligated to be removed and the existing Lamar Advertising sign will be removed," he said.

"It should look pretty nice there," he said.

The next step in the approval of Clark's final plat, as well as those of Terry Hoeper and Mark Selsor, will be a pre-application meeting at 3 p.m. Thursday in the city hall conference room.

He said that he is currently in negotiations with a national restaurant chain and other businesses that are interested in locating in the shopping center.

At this time, Clark said that he did not have any firm estimates for the cost of building the road, however he thought it would run between $400,000 and $500,000.

The actual cost of the road and what will go in the development will depend on just what goes into the shopping center and at this point he cannot tell the city who he is talking to or what businesses will be going into the center.

In other business the commission:

* Held a public hearing and voted to accept the proposal from Terry Hoeper to replat Lakewood Village as the preliminary plat for Marmaduke Park Estates. Lynn Calton, the engineer for the project told the commission that Hoeper would like to enlarge two of the lots on the gravel road leading from Marmaduke Park to the partially finished houses, reducing the total number of lots from 16 to 14.

This will be the most recent reincarnation of the Acorn Televillages project proposed by British developer Ashley Dobbs. He proposed building a housing development on 50 acres of the former Nevada State Hospital property that the Missouri State Legislature gave to the city after the hospital was closed in the early 1990's.

Dobbs proposed building houses with built in high-speed Internet connections to allow residents to operate businesses from their homes using high-speed digital communications.

A similar project that Dobbs built in Britain went bankrupt several years ago.

Hoeper told the commission that he also wants to build the asphalt roads in the development without curbs and guttering, instead, using shallow grass ditches to direct rainwater into a drainage system.

"We would like to drop the sidewalks and curb and guttering to make the area more like a rural setting inside the city limits," Hoeper told the commission.

He said that he would also like to widen the streets from the 25-foot width in the Lakewood plat to 30-foot.

* Voted to send a positive recommendation to the city council to approve closing Main Street between Hardin Drive and North Avenue at the request of Todd Thorpe. North Avenue runs along the south side of Benton Hall at the Nevada Habilitation Center. Ron Clow, city building inspector, told the commission that Thorpe and his family have owned the property on the east side of Main Street for several years and they want to sell the property to Mark Selsor, who wants to develop the property.

* Held a public hearing and voted to accept the preliminary replat blocks five and seven of the Barton Meadows addition at the request of Mark Selsor. Clow said that Selsor has purchased the property, contingent on the property being replatted. The property is located south of Benton Hall on the east side of the part of Main Street that Todd Thorpe requested the city to close.