Pocatello is on the verge of major Northgate home, tech, retail, office project

Before you can build, you need a road.

Olympus Drive now reaches north into the ambitious Northgate development that proposes as many as 10,000 new homes and a 1-million-square-foot technology park along with an array of retail and office opportunities for the north edge of Pocatello and east edge of Chubbuck.

Northgate is an unprecedented public-private partnership in Idaho involving Millennial Development Partners, the project leader, and Portneuf Development on the private side and the cities of Pocatello and Chubbuck, Bannock County and the Idaho Transportation Department on the public side.

Millennial Development built the 1-mile extension that takes Olympus north to a new traffic circle and continues west as Northgate Parkway to Interstate 15. These initial roads were built with $3.4 million from Millennial and Portneuf, $2 million from Pocatello Development Authority, $450,000 cash and $50,000 in-kind from Pocatello and $1.3 million from Bannock County.

ITD expects to start construction at the start of November on a new Northgate freeway interchange that will take Northgate Parkway across the freeway to Chubbuck, which is extending Siphon Road to the new interchange.

The freeway interchange should be completed by the end of summer 2019, said Buck Swaney, founder and managing principal at Millennial Development Partners and the visionary behind Northgate.

The road construction also involved underground installation of electrical, sewer, water, fiber and gas for the total development of the ultimate 4,500-acre project.

“This is about circulation for the whole region,” Swaney said. “It just so happens it gives up access to the Northgate project.”

Northgate Parkway next year will be extended east from the traffic circle to enable construction of the first phase of Northgate’s initial housing development, a still-to-be-determined number of homes on about 50 or 60 acres. The developer will be Portneuf Development, which has 150 acres in the immediate area.

Swaney is lining up development partners for the first 15 to 20 acres of his 60-acre lifestyle center/outdoor mall that he is calling The District.

“We are working hard on some dining concepts,” Swaney said. “We are working very hard on a grocery store. We are working very hard on a hotel.”

In 2019, Swaney also wants to build a three- or four-level, 18,000- to 20,000-square-foot mixed-use building with ground floor retail at The District.

“That is all the things we are working on marketing in the coming year,” Swaney said.