With Walmart on board, Cottage Grove looks to market commercial land on Cottage Grove Drive-In site

Talk about it

What’s in a name? When it comes to marketing a commercial retail site, a lot, apparently.

With the Cottage Grove City Council’s approval earlier this month of a proposed Walmart store to be built on a portion of the soon-to-close Cottage View Drive-In site, city economic development officials have begun to consider how to sell more retailers and commercial developers on building in the area the city has pegged as a future retail hub.

Officials say the 178,000-square-foot Walmart SuperCenter on East Point Douglas Road will kick off long-awaited development in the city’s southern East Ravine area near County Highway 19 and U.S. Highway 61.

Now, Danette Parr, the city’s economic development director, said the city has started discussing how to market the area more aggressively to more potential retailers. The first step, officials say, is picking a name for the future retail the city believes will sprout around the Walmart that is due to open in 2014.

Mayor Myron Bailey and many Economic Development Authority members said they favored including “Cottage View” in a future moniker to help define the future retail area’s location for prospective developers.

“It makes it easier to market an area when people know where it is,” Bailey said in an interview. “If we call it the “Ravine Plaza,” a reference to the nearby regional park, “no one outside Cottage Grove really knows where that is.”

The city will begin formulating a master plan for the roughly 90-acre Cottage View commercial site. Bailey said he would like to see the area resemble the proposed retail center proposed in 2007 that failed to materialize

“My concern is I want to make sure we have an idea of what the rest of the layout will be,” he said.

Interested retailers and developers have already approached the city since Walmart was finalized, Bailey said, and he says he hopes long-planned development in the East Ravine is to follow as a result of city hall’s efforts to be primed for growth as the recession fades.

“I think we’ll start seeing the benefits of what we’ve been working on the past four years,” Bailey said.

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