The company and city are working on four issues in the meantime, officials said:

• Bear Creek Capital LLC, the developer, is signing tenants.

• The city and company are working with Sanitation District No. 1 and the state to remedy storm-water problems posed by the hilly site.

• They also want to gain access to state and federal properties so they can build a connector road as part of the development that links Memorial Parkway with Carothers Road.

• The city continues to negotiate with property owners who have resisted selling their land to make way for the development, City Manager Phil Ciafardini said.

The 56-acre site - which sits just west of I-471 between the Memorial Parkway and Grand Avenue/Carothers Road exits - is much larger than it appears from the interstate, said Greg Scheper, director of acquisitions for Bear Creek.

"It's deceptive because the topography is so extreme," Scheper said. Officials plan to use parts of area hillsides to raise valleys closer to the interstate, he said.

"It won't be your typical strip center," Scheper said. He said it will have a more upscale feel and probably a bell tower and other architectural distinctions.

He envisions three anchors: a grocery store, a department store similar to Target, and probably a home-improvement store.

City commissioners tonight will consider renewing $12.1 million of bond anticipation notes that were sold two years ago to acquire properties in the Cote Brilliante neighborhood to make way for the project.

When Bear Creek buys that land from the city, the notes will be repaid and the sale amount will be folded into a $92 million issuance of industrial building revenue bonds.

Aside from tenant-signings, the three other issues are still being addressed:

• Storm water needs. A stream critical to the area's storm-water system runs through the site, and Newport is working with state environmental officials and Sanitation District No. 1 to resolve "whether that remains an open stream, or whether it gets piped in," Ciafardini said.

"There's been different plans on it, and it's just a matter of working with the appropriate agencies to come up with the best approach," he said. "We all know it's a challenging site, topography issues, but I think Bear Creek's got experience to deal with those types of things."

• Property acquisition. Several property owners sued to keep Newport from forcing them to sell their homes. Campbell Circuit Judge Leonard Kopowski ruled for the city in June, but some owners appealed to the Kentucky Court of Appeals.

"The three (owners) that have standing have appealed, but we're still hopeful that we'll be able to negotiate a deal with all of them," Ciafardini said.

• A connector road. "We're looking to, for the most part, create a connector road between the two state routes, 1120 (Memorial Parkway and 10th Street) and 1892 (Carothers Road and Grand Avenue)," Ciafardini said.

"There's definitely a benefit of us or the developer building the connector, because it takes traffic off the interstate," he said. That would reduce the number of people using I-471 to get from Carothers to Memorial Parkway, he said.

"That's not what the interstate was designed to be, a connector road, so we think this will be a benefit to the state," Ciafardini said. "So we're working on various rights of way issues."

The city would acquire rights of way from the state and federal governments, but the connector would be built as part of the development, he said.

E-mail mrutledge@enquirer.com