Economic development officials in Des Moines are working to extend the proposed Northeast Hubbell Avenue Corridor to the far northeast side.

The city had planned to designate about 50 acres in the vicinity of Cold Stream Business Park at 4500 Hubbell Ave. as an urban renewal area and tax increment financing district. But now planners are considering a 350- to 400-acre swath of land stretching to Interstate 80 to the north and Altoona to the east.

Across the U.S. Highway 65 bypass at the intersection of Interstate 80 in Altoona, Heart of America Group is also gearing up to begin its build-out of Prairie Crossing, a 174-acre commercial, office and retail development. Bass Pro Shops Outdoor World, that development’s anchor, opened in August.

“We were originally looking at a smaller area that really just encompassed the park,” said Matt Anderson, the city’s economic development administrator. But following this summer’s annexation of about 1,800 acres in the northeast area of Des Moines, planners reconsidered.

“So we took our 2020 (Community) Character Plan and kind of followed those boundaries of commercial development and are crafting new boundaries around that,” Anderson said.

Cold Stream Business Park was born in April, when Baker Real Estate LP received preliminary approval to subdivide the 50-acre parcel into nine lots for commercial development. The park’s developer, Andy Holt, is expected to relocate his Water Landscape Supply business to Cold Stream sometime in the next 15 to 21 months.

Tim Barardi, owner of CFI Tire Inc., which had been slated to be the first business to begin operating at Cold Stream, said in September that “financing issues” had indefinitely stalled his plans to construct a 166,000-square-foot building on the site at a cost of $11.5 million. At that time, Barardi said the project could still move forward in 2010.

That “will obviously slow things down a little,” in terms of development in the business park, Anderson said. And though there are no immediate plans to begin building out infrastructure in the expanded area northeast of Cold Stream, the city wants to lay the groundwork for future commercial development opportunities in the region.

“We thought it made sense to capture that area so the urban renewal area matched the 2020 plan,” Anderson said. “It made sense to create a larger urban renewal area, because at some point we’re probably going to need some funds to put some infrastructure up in that area and possibly some business assistance if it does grow.”

“We will come back with the formal process over the next couple of months and get it finalized,” he said.