NorthPoint proposal delayed by maybe a week

Joliet has pushed back the date when the Plan Commission will consider NorthPoint Developments pre-annexation agreement.

The proposed annexation was taken off the agenda for the commission's regular meeting on Feb. 20.

The city, however, is likely to schedule a special meeting for the following week on the NorthPoint plan, interim City Manager Steve Jones said Friday.

Jones said the city this week first received NorthPoint's pre-annexation proposal and needs more time to review it.

"This is an incredibly complicated project as you can imagine," Jones said. "We all agreed that we needed a little bit more time."

NorthPoint wants to annex nearly 1,300 acres into Joliet as part of a larger Compass Business Park that would extend into Manhattan and Elwood.

Jones said the city was running up a deadline for publishing a public notice on a public hearing for the NorthPoint plan and did not want to commit to the hearing until the proposal had been sufficiently reviewed.

City staff was going over the proposal with NorthPoint representatives on Friday at the same time that a decision had to be made on posting the public hearing. Jones said he decided to pull the NorthPoint proposal off the Feb. 20 agenda and have a special meeting scheduled.

"It could take two weeks for us to really lock this thing down," Jones said.

The date of the special meeting has not been set.