North Platte City Council members Tuesday will debate proposals to sell city land for a 51-lot modular housing development and further develop Twin Rivers Business Park, both with help from tax increment financing.
Public hearings on both projects will precede initial council votes during the 5:30 p.m. meeting in the City Hall council chamber, 211 W. Third St.
Council members also will take their third and final vote on an unrelated ordinance updating North Platte’s residential zoning regulations after a review prompted by a 2020 state law.
They previously advanced the updates on May 3 and May 17, both times by 5-3 votes.
Among other things, the package would reduce the types of residential zoning districts from four to three. Duplexes and townhouses would be allowed in R-2 and R-3 zones and with conditional use permits in R-1 zones.
The Twin Rivers and housing proposals were put forward last month by the North Platte Area Chamber & Development Corp., which owns the business park on State Farm Road.
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Council members will begin with their hearing and their first of two votes Tuesday on the chamber’s request to buy 13.2 acres at West 17th Street and Adams Avenue for the housing development.
That would cover slightly more than half of 23 acres the city owns between 17th Street and the North Platte Cemetery. The southernmost 10 acres would remain in city hands for possible cemetery expansion in the future.
The entire 23 acres has been deemed “substandard and blighted” for TIF purposes since 1996. North Platte’s 2011 comprehensive plan recommends housing be developed in that area, Chamber President and CEO Gary Person said Friday.
He has said the housing project would provide a “shovel-ready” area for more single-family homes in advance of Sustainable Beef LLC’s planned processing plant and the chamber’s intended industrial rail park outside Hershey.
Chamber leaders are seeking $1.87 million in TIF aid to offset their costs of installing streets and utilities, Person said.
Individual lots would be sold to a developer, which would install prebuilt modular homes on foundations. Such homes are built like “stick-built” homes but are assembled at a factory and transported to their lot.
Chamber leaders hope homeowners can buy the modular homes for $250,000 or less, Person said Friday. That depends on whether building supplies keep rising, he added.
Even at the $250,000 price, the project’s proposed 51 homes would instantly take their place among the most valuable homes north of North Platte’s Union Pacific tracks.
Only three of the north side’s 1,705 single-family homes had 2021 taxable values of $250,000 or more, according to Lincoln County Assessor’s Office records. The highest of those three had a valuation of $251,740.
Because the city-owned land is exempt from property taxes, its purchase by the chamber would put the 51-lot project’s site on North Platte’s property tax rolls.
Local governments would share about $2,800 in first-year property taxes, based on an estimated initial taxable value of $120,000 in the chamber’s redevelopment plan.
As usual with TIF, property taxes from future growth in taxable values would go to repay the project’s TIF-eligible costs for up to 15 years.
The city’s Planning Commission and Community Development Authority each unanimously recommended council approval of the housing project after respective meetings last Tuesday and Wednesday.
Approval of the project’s redevelopment plan requires only a single council vote. The chamber’s project, however, also requires an ordinance rezoning the site from A-1 “transitional agricultural” to R-2 residential.
Like most city ordinances, the rezoning ordinance would require three positive council votes unless members chose to waive one or two of those votes.
First-round debate on that ordinance will follow a hearing and a single council vote on the chamber’s redevelopment plan for the rest of Twin Rivers.
It seeks $2.8 million in TIF aid to help install streets and utilities in the 19-year-old park’s undeveloped 80 acres.
Several new business projects since 2019 have mostly filled out both sides of Twin Rivers Road on the park’s east side.
CRA and Planning Commission members also recommended approval of the Twin Rivers plan by unanimous votes last week.
