By Vernon Robison
Moapa Valley Progress
The long wait is nearly over for die-hard fans of the Stagecoach Depot store at Glendale. Glendale officials anticipate that the newly constructed building will be opening in mid-September beginning with a brand new expanded convenience store.
“We are excited about the opening,” said Glendale Group partner Randy Aleman. “It has been a long, hard road getting to where we are. But we are going to have a beautiful store and it will be a positive thing for the community.”
The new convenience store will span 4500 sq. ft of the new building. But Aleman anticipates it being much more than just the average convenience store. It is being constructed with more freezer and refrigerator cases than is typical in a convenience store so that it can better serve the community’s needs, Aleman said.
“We want to provide the daily things that people in the Moapa community need without them having to always travel into town to get them,” Aleman said. “For that, we set it up to be more like a small grocery store than just a convenience store.”
The gas station and convenience store will be rebranded to ARCO and AM/PM. The ARCO is expected to provide more affordable fuel to residents and highway travellers alike. The gas station will be adding two pumps to have a total of six at the location.
“We will offer gasoline of course, as well as diesel and propane,” Aleman said. “And because it is ARCO it will be the cheapest gas on the highway.”
The store is expected to be open in the next 2-3 weeks. But that is only part of the restoration of services at Glendale. The Glendale cafe is expected to open about a month later with a 2500 sq. ft diner.
Regular customers of the old Glendale cafe will be happy to know that the menu will stay more or less the same. “We’ll be serving the same menu as we always did,” said Glendale manager Beverly Madewell. “What we fondly refer to as Glendale food.”
The menu will receive one welcome addition, however. “We have installed a pizza oven so that we can serve fresh pizzas,” Aleman said.
The historic Glendale cafe building was burned in a fire in April 2008. Since that time, Aleman and his partners have been struggling to rebuild. Continuing service to the community was a priority to the group, Aleman said.
“Early on after the fire, we spent about $150,000 on the little temporary convenience store that is there now,” Aleman said. “We wanted to provide that place where local people could go to grab a gallon of milk, a dozen eggs or a loaf of bread.”
The construction of the new building has taken the past three years and about $2.3 million. The project has been riddled with complications along the way. It was originally part of the 1400 acre Riverview Major Project. As such, it became weighed down with all the requirements that applied to a major development project, Aleman said.
“Because we were part of Riverview when we started to rebuild, the county kept coming back to us wanting a second bite of the apple,” Aleman said. “They wanted us to spend a lot on road improvements and full off-sites. We kept saying: Hold one guys, we just want to get re-opened!”
Eventually the Glendale site was separated out from the Riverview project to simplify the rebuilding. But there were still a lot of unforeseen obstacles that cropped up, Aleman said.
“You’re talking about 100 years of history in that location,” he said. We kept finding old septic systems and old water sisterns that weren’t on the site plan. Then it would be an added cost to deal with them.”
In addition to all of this, the project has had to go on through difficult economic conditions. Financing for business has been difficult to find and that has slowed down the project as well, Aleman said.
The opening of the new building won’t be the end of the plans for Aleman and his group. Rather it is only the beginning of the new Glendale, he said. In the works are also plans to build a large roping arena at Glendale where 2-3 major ropings could be held each year. The arena would also be open to locals to host smaller events on the weekends, Aleman said. The arena area would also be equipped with a large outdoor barbecue area in order to accomodate the roping events taking place.
Also planned for the site in the more distant future is the expansion of the motel and the eventual return of the Halloween Corn Maze, Aleman said.
