The Crookston Planning Commission held a special meeting on Tuesday night in the City hall council chambers.
The lone item on the agenda was the approval of rezoning a large portion of the Ag Innovation Campus from an I-1 Heavy Industrial zone to an I-2 Light Industrial zone. “Heavy Industrial is the heavy manufacturing such as large utility,” said Crookston Building Official Greg Hefta, “It requires large capital infrastructures where light industrial requires much less, like medium or small capital requirements.”
According to the city’s ordinance regarding heavy industrial zones include areas that are used for manufacturing, compounding, assembly, packaging, treatment or storage of the following products or materials; brewing, cement, concrete, stone cutting, mill working, meat packing, flour, feed, grain milling, asphalt distillation etc.
The Crookston City ordinance regarding light industrial zones explains the intent is to provide for industrial uses that may be suitably located in areas of relatively close proximity to non-industrial development. Permitted uses include; Warehouse, packing and crating establishment, laboratories for research and quality control, offices, and the manufacturing of compounding or processing food products.
“If you could visualize basically south of Titan, and corner of Crystal Sugar,” said Hefta, “Or Ingersoll and Highway 75 south. Basically the ten acres the Ag Innovation Center has to the county met property is where we would like to make it light industrial and that’s about 36 acres.”
There are multiple anonymous businesses that have contacted the city regarding this area. The Planning Commission believed changing the zone to light a light industrial zone would benefit future development.
The Planning Commission had consensus to recommend the Crookston city council to approve the zoning change.
