Clarkdale has a lot of land open for potential development.
For the past year, the town has been making an attempt to be proactive about it, looking at which land might be eventually developed and how to deal with any particular challenges that face those areas.
The town has identified four areas that are distinct: The State Route 89A corridor, the Broadway Corridor, the Bitter Creek Industrial area and the Arts and Entertainment District.
The district allows businesses inside its boundaries to have a liquor license while waiving the requirement that they operate at least 300 feet away from churches and schools.
The Clarkdale Planning Commission has decided to start with looking at the State Route 89A corridor.
The area, filled with plenty of roundabouts and a few businesses, is fairly large.
The town has broken it down into separate sections in order to make the process easier.
The first area of focus has been the section along State Route 89A from Clarkdale Parkway to the Centerville roundabout.
“It’s an area planning process,” said Beth Escobar, a senior planner with the town of Clarkdale. “It’s to develop a way to retain businesses and attract new business.”
The process was started by the planning commission in the summer of 2014.
“They looked at it and decided to break it into segments,” Escobar said.
Most of the area is already zoned commercial with a bit of industrial for an existing business.
The commission started holding a series of public meetings earlier in 2015.
The meetings brought property owners, business owners and even fire department officials together to look at the future.
The fire department already has plans to eventually build on some of the land in the area behind a local feed store, Escobar said.
The meetings were held with the idea that future development will be somewhat challenging, due to the size of some properties and limited access from the highway.
Escobar said there was some discussion of what sorts of businesses the community would like to see in the area.
“They’d like it to be tied to the arts district, tied to downtown,” Escobar said.
There are people who live within walking distance of the corridor to making foot traffic somewhat of a consideration.
Escobar said that the town reached out to the Yavapai-Apache Nation, which has part of its reservation on one end of the corridor, but didn’t get any response.
“The best result is that property owners started to talk to each other,” Escobar said.
Escobar said that those who voiced an opinion didn’t really want to see businesses that focused on alcohol.
The community would like to see the possibility of bringing in higher-end businesses, Escobar said.
That’s not something like a big box store, Escobar said. Those require a larger amount of square feet than is available in the area.
The discussion tended to lean toward smaller professional offices and boutique shops, Escobar said.
Pharmacies, a movie theater and art galleries were all put up by the public as examples of businesses that might make a good fit.
Any development also needs to take into consideration the impact of additional traffic on trucks leaving the nearby cement plant, according to a town report.
Escobar said that a master plan will hopefully be brought back to the council in 2016.
The next step would be to look at other parts of the State Route 89A corridor.
“It’s really hard to decide what is the most critical area in the town because they all need it,” Escobar said.
