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CLEARLAKE – The city of Clearlake is unveiling its plans for a regional shopping center – which will have a Lowe's home improvement store as its anchor tenant – on the site of the city's former airport property, with a February 2011 deadline for groundbreaking.
The Clearlake Redevelopment Agency is proposing to sell 15 acres of the 26-acre Pearce Airport to a developer, and use $6 million of the $8.5 million the agency has in the form of bond proceeds to make needed infrastructure upgrades to the site.
City officials also are proposing that the project – formally titled the Clearlake Airport Redevelopment Project – be approved without an environmental impact report.
The project is expected to generate significant sales tax revenue, along with jobs and future development, for the city of Clearlake, hit hard by the recent economic downturn.
However, questions already are arising about the development's possible impacts on businesses around the lake, whether it's a proper use of redevelopment funds and if more environmental study needs to be done.
Following nearly three years of behind-closed-doors negotiations with a developer, the Clearlake Redevelopment Agency has sent neighboring government agencies a notice about the commercial plan, which City Administrator Dale Neiman called “a complicated transaction.”
The project will be the subject of a Jan. 7 public hearing at Clearlake City Hall before a joint meeting of the Clearlake City Council and Clearlake Redevelopment Agency, whose members are the same.
Neiman, also the redevelopment agency's executive director, prepared Clearlake's initial study on the project.
The public review period for the project's proposed mitigated negative declaration began on Dec. 1 and will end Dec. 31 at 5 p.m. The documents are available at the Clearlake City Hall, 14050 Olympic Drive.
The redevelopment agency's notice, issued Dec. 1, explains that the project site – located between Highway 53, Old Highway 53, Airport Road and 18th Avenue – includes seven parcels of land. The agency has owned the land since 1996; the airport closed in 1994.
A map accompanying the city's notice states that the building area at the 15-acre project will total 154,179 square feet.
The proposed project's developer is KK Raphel Properties of Danville. The principals in that company are part of Katz Kirkpatrick Properties of Roseville, a shopping center development, leasing and management company that has developed projects around Northern California.
The Clearlake Redevelopment Agency entered into an exclusive negotiating agreement with Katz Kirkpatrick over the airport property development in April of 2007.
Negotiations have taken place behind closed doors ever since, as Lake County News has reported, with numerous performance deadlines adjusted and extended.
Fred Katz, the company's principal, did not return a call seeking comment on Tuesday. ` In the notice issued to local agencies, sent out in compliance with the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), the Clearlake Redevelopment Agency proposes findings that include a mitigated project with “no significant environmental impact.”
The agency is seeking a mitigated negative declaration, which would remove the need for an environmental impact report.
The city is requiring Wal-Mart, which is seeking to enlarge is current store on Dam Road Extension by about 40,000 square feet, to complete an EIR, as Lake County News has reported. However, Neiman said there is a big difference between the two projects, with Wal-Mart having “very serious traffic problems” at Dam Road and Dam Road Extension.
With the airport property, he suggested traffic would be the most serious concern, but it could be mitigated.
At the Jan. 7 meeting, the council and redevelopment agency will decide whether or not to do an EIR or to certify the existing environmental document; whether or not to sell the property, the agreement for which is about 100 pages; consider abandoning a right-of-way on Airport Road; and, if that right-of-way is abandoned, decide on a proposed property exchange to the south for a right-of-way with Superior Acquisitions, which owns the adjacent former Outrageous Waters site.
Still not finalized is the property's asking price. Neiman said the property appraised for $4 per square foot, which comes out to more than $2.6 million.
But that won't necessarily be the asking price, as adjustments to the price need to be made due to the land's condition. Neiman said the land has a large amount of fill that will need to be replaced at an estimated cost of $1.8 million.
Half a million dollars also must be set aside in escrow to deal with the possibility that hazardous materials are discovered on the site, said Neiman. If such materials aren't found, the city gets the money back; if they are, the city can go through a process to recoup the money from the previous owner.
The area also needs road and sewer upgrades, with the sewer upgrades alone estimated to cost $5 million; the redevelopment agency and the county's Special Districts division are proposing to split the costs.
Without those upgrades – which would be considered “extraordinary improvements” if required of a developer – Neiman said the property likely wouldn't be developed. In addition to making the shopping center happen, Neiman said the upgrades also will help local homes and businesses.
He said the redevelopment agency will recoup almost all of the $2.5 million it invests in the sewer improvements through developer impact fees of $833 on each of the 3,000 new single family dwelling hookups that will be added to the system.
The plan's shape emerges
The Katz Kirkpatrick Properties Web site has the Clearlake redevelopment project listed under its “new shopping centers” section. They're currently offering four shopping center spaces retail pads, two of them measuring 3,200 square feet, and the others 3,863 and 6,000 square feet in size.
“This development project is a great opportunity for those looking for a prime retail site that will attract the residents of Clearlake and Lake County and the many visitors that frequent this recreational getaway,” the site states.
According to the plan, the project's first parcel, measuring 9.68 acres, is expected to house a Lowe's home improvement center. The 111,348 square foot, single-story building will have a 25,568 square foot outdoor garden center.
The next three parcels – measuring 0.8, 0.9 and 0.9 acres, respectively – will be developed with drive-through restaurants; parcel five, measuring 1.6 acres, will have a sitdown restaurant, and parcels six and seven, measuring 0.5 and 0.7 acres respectively, will have business services or repair services, the document said.
Last year, as negotiations continued, some of the details of the plans emerged as part of a sewer capacity system study prepared by CH2MHILL in July of 2008 for the Clearlake Redevelopment Agency and Home Depot, which originally was looking at being the anchor store.
However, as Lake County News outlined in a three-part series last December, the economy led Home Depot to put their plans on hold and, eventually, to pull out of the project altogether, after the city worked with them for a year and a half, according to Neiman.
“Lowe's came in right behind them,” and has been negotiating with the city for over a year, Neiman said.
“The hard part was finding the major anchor tenants,” he added.
He said Lowe's has confirmed they'll anchor the development.
The sewer capacity study completed for Home Depot had referenced a supermarket in the development. However, Neiman said a Safeway won't be located there because the development area isn't big enough, but there are plans to build it nearby on the former water park site.
While city officials are attaching the Lowe's name to the project, company representative would not confirm an agreement to come to Clearlake.
Gerard Littlejohn, a spokesman for Lowe's Companies Inc., based in Mooresville, NC, told Lake County News this week that the company is always evaluating potential sites, but that real estate process can be a lengthy and complex one.
“It’s our policy not to comment about specific sites Lowe’s may be considering unless we have closed on all real estate matters,” Littlejohn said, adding that they haven't closed the real estate process in Clearlake.
Littlejohn said when Lowe’s evaluates potential store sites, they consider “literally hundreds of factors,” some of which include an area’s population, home ownership and ease of access for a particular site.
“Our store sizes vary by market, but typically provide between 94,000 square feet of retail sales space up to 117,000 square feet of retail sales space,” he said. “All sizes include additional, adjacent garden centers.”
Neiman said the council will consider entering into a disposition and development agreement with the developer that will allow them to regulate what goes on the development site for the next 30 years. The construction must break ground by February of 2011.
Community members seek information
Lori Peters, executive director of the Clear Lake Chamber of Commerce, said Tuesday that the chamber couldn't make any comments yet regarding the project itself.
“We're actually in the dark at this moment,” she said.
Peters said the chamber decided to take a proactive approach to get more information, so the group's board of directors invited the developers to a Wednesday evening meeting to discuss what the project will entail.
“We just want to get an idea of what's going on,” she said.
The question about the use of redevelopment bond funds for the airport project is scheduled to be discussed by the Clearlake Redevelopment Agency's advisory committee at its meeting this Friday, Dec. 18, at 3:30 p.m.
In a series of e-mail exchanges, Neiman told committee members that they weren't authorized to discuss the property sale and that he was directing the group's secretary not to place any items on the advisory committee's agenda having to do with the airport.
Neiman also accused committee chair Robert Riggs of breaking the Brown Act by circulating e-mails to advisory committee members, which Riggs challenged.
The committee nevertheless is scheduled on Friday to discuss whether it should suggest to the agency's board of directors that the advisory committee could undertake a study regarding the proposed expenditure of redevelopment bond proceeds in connection with the airport.
Coming up: Lake County News will report on the reactions from local businesses and leaders.
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At first read I was kinda excited about a Lowes but then I realized what that would do to all the locally-owned hardware stores like Kelseyville Lumber, Piedmont Lumber, Mendo Mill (well, sorta local) and the collection of Ace and True Value stores. Some of these won't survive, so it would just be Clearlake taking traffic from other parts of the Lake or other existing businesses.
Seriously, government, we have to work together up here on long-term strategies.
This whole county is in the tourism business, flat plain and simple. What needs to be done is develop additional tourism-related businesses, things that makes us truly unique and a destination for people with money. We need to look to businesses that provide incremental revenue and additional draw, not just take from another corner of the Lake and send our money out of town.
Suddenly the people of Clearlake aren't going to say, "ahhhh, I can finally buy 2X4s." They already do. And from local families who then spend their money on other local businesses, not from giant corporate chains that then spend their money paying off stock certificates.
What seriously needs to happen up here is the development of retail tourism that is unique to our area so people return here to get that unique product or experience.
That can include taking advantage of our exceptional local agriculture to create products that are representative of Lake County. We should also work on our own existing businesses to make them more palatable to those coming from out of town. Simple things like lighting, paint, signage. We already have great parking which, to someone from San Francisco, Sacramento or Santa Rosa, is almost unheard of.
Fast food and big box stores are not something we need at all up here. Let's keep this area uniquely local and work on building that as our draw. And everybody who owns a business or has been to a locally-owned business should go an oppose this development loudly, clearly and succinctly.