More than three years of battling over Winona bluffs will all come down to this.

The Winona City Council will hold a final public hearing at 7:30 tonight on an ordinance to limit building on and near bluffs.

After the hearing the council may vote on the proposal, which took so long to craft that the council imposed a moratorium to freeze bluff development until the ordinance was adopted. Part of the holdup stemmed from competing interests: A local environmental group pressed for a more-restrictive bluff ordinance, and the Winona Area Chamber of Commerce wanted looser restrictions.

The process also paused this summer when city planners realized hundreds of existing homes would be affected by the ordinance. To ease its impact on those homes, planners recommended creating an exemption to the bluff restrictions that would apply to all lots that aren't in a subdivision plat. But planning commissioners subsequently narrowed that exemption so that only existing buildings in bluff zones would be spared from the new restrictions.

Winona would take a big step by adopting the final ordinance, though it's not a perfect product, said Bluff Land Environment Watch spokesman Joe Morse.

"We feel like this ordinance is a really good start," Morse said. "We think it just needs a little bit of strengthening."

Meanwhile, Winona County leaders are mulling a bluff ordinance that would affect rural land, and county commissioners may vote on it next month.

Assisted-living center TIF may get hearing

A developer's request for public aid to build an assisted-living center on Mankato Avenue may go before the public soon, depending on what Winona leaders decide tonight.

St. Cloud-based Trident Development wants $710,000 in tax increment financing aid to build Sugar Loaf Senior Living Center next to Walgreens Pharmacy.

City leaders haven't responded to the request yet. If they choose to entertain the request, they're required to hold a public hearing before granting TIF, which allows property taxes on a development to be redirected to pay for infrastructure upgrades, or to pay for the development itself.

Trident's proposed $11 million, 80-unit senior-living center would feature independent, assisted-living and memory-support housing units. A Trident spokesman told the Daily News the facility would meet one of Winona's biggest projected needs in the coming decades: affordable senior housing.

"There's some true public benefit that this TIF can bring to Winona," Trident spokesman Roger Fink said.

Fink said Trident considered six sites for its proposed senior-living center, but the Mankato Avenue site was the only one that fit. Other developers have eyed Winona to build senior-living centers, but the scarcity and high cost of open land drove them away, Fink said.

The council last year granted TIF aid to a developer to build a senior-living cooperative, Applewood Pointe, in East Burns Valley. That developer later pulled out of the project, and a Mankato developer recently announced plans to revive it.