Sartell to Host Mill Site Open House Monday May 11th; Light Industrial Leads New Plan

(KNSI) – The vision for the former Verso Paper mill site is coming into sharper focus, and residents who imagined a riverfront destination packed with public amenities may want to temper their expectations.

The City of Sartell is hosting an open house on Monday, May 11th from 4:00 to 5:30 p.m. to walk the public through new renderings and the recommendation on what should come next at the 218-acre Mill District site along the Mississippi River. The event will be a come-and-go format with five stations staffed by city personnel and the owner’s rep team.

The recommendation on the table is light industrial development paired with a regional park feel, a notable shift from the mixed-use commercial gateway many residents envisioned during the city’s first round of community engagement a few years ago.

Nikki Sweeter, Sartell’s Director of Engagement and Experiences, told KNSI News the city hired a group to help with redevelopment, about a year ago, spent roughly nine months talking with developers and stakeholders before bringing a recommendation back to council. “They went to the market to say, is this realistic. And honestly, some parts of it were and parts of it weren’t.”

Access is one of the biggest reasons the recommendation leans industrial rather than retail or restaurants. The site has only one entry point, and it crosses railroad tracks, a constraint that makes high-traffic commercial uses tough to pencil out. Light industrial generates fewer trips per day, the owner’s rep concluded, making it a better fit for the geography.

Sweeter framed the phasing as a question of who pays. “If we want to start doing a bunch of public amenities there right now, it’s going to be at the cost of people that live here.”

The recommendation breaks the project into phases. Phase one is securing a commercial or light industrial anchor to start generating tax base. Phase two is the public amenities piece, the riverfront access, trails, docks and gathering spaces that drove much of the community’s early enthusiasm.

Under Sartell’s I-1 Light Industrial zoning, permitted uses can include manufacturing with minimal noxious effects, agricultural and farm equipment sales, building materials yards, call centers, and heating, ventilation and air conditioning service businesses. Heavier uses such as foundries, paper mills, cement production and chemical manufacturing are restricted to the I-2 Heavy Industrial District.

Sweeter said council has not yet voted on whether to accept the owner’s rep recommendation or authorize a listing agreement. If council does move forward, the suggested timeline for marketing the site nationally and locally is 18 to 24 months.

She pointed out that just removing the existing concrete on the site would cost millions of dollars before any amenity construction could begin.

Some river engagement is moving ahead independently of the larger redevelopment. The pedestrian bridge across the river is already in place, and Sweeter said the trail connection on the mill site itself will open this summer, allowing people to walk across the bridge and onto the property for the first time.

The mill site has been a redevelopment puzzle for more than a decade. A compressor explosion and fire on Memorial Day, May 28th, 2012, killed one worker, injured four others and required 14 area fire departments to extinguish. Verso Paper announced the permanent shutdown that August, putting roughly 260 people out of work and ending more than a century of papermaking in Sartell.

AIM Development purchased the property in 2013 and demolished the mill. The city closed on 51 acres of the former mill site and an additional 167 acres along Fourth Avenue South in June 2023, paying $950,000 from its Property Development Fund.

The May 11th open house will be held at Sartell City Hall. Residents who can’t attend will still have channels to submit feedback through the city’s project page.

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