Sewer a big ‘if’ for Fred Meyer’s N. Bend store plans

Fred Meyer has told NewsChannel 21 it hopes to build one of its large one-stop shopping stores at U.S. Highway 20 and Cooley Road on the north end of Bend. But the city’s top planner said Thursday the area lacks sewer capacity, so the retailer would need to spend millions on a short-term solution of that issue.

“We absolutely want to do it,” Manager of Community Affairs Melinda Merrill said Wednesday evening of locating a store on the site, north of Cascade Village Shopping Center.

She confirmed the company’s desire to build a 175,000-square-foot store (and fuel center) employing 250 to 300 people on 57 acres it has an option to purchase, at the northeast corner of Highway 20 and Cooley Road, across from Sportsman’s Warehouse.

“We’re always looking for new store opportunities,” Merrill said, adding that the idea of a second Bend store – and third in the region, along with Redmond’s – “started to really rise up through the organization” in the past couple of years.

But at its latest pre-application meeting Tuesday with city of Bend planners, Merrill said Fred Meyer representatives learned “there’s not sewer capacity out there right now” to proceed.

Actually, the city has “been talking to Fred Meyer for some time now,” said Bend Community Development Director Mel Oberst. The trouble is, he acknowledged, “There is no sewer capacity out there right now. The north end has really serious sewer capacity issues.”

“We have some … manholes up on the north end that basically have limited capacity for additional development,” city Engineer Russell Grayson said Thursday.

Merrill said Fred Meyer knows it will have to pay to hook up to the sewer — that the issue is sewer service being available from the city.

“We connect to the sewer any time we build a store. We know what that’s going to take, we know the improvements on a piece of land,” she said. “But we need the city to figure out how to get the capacity there.”

The long-term solution, Oberst said, is a project called the North Interceptor, a large sewer line that would collect the area’s sewage and bring it to the city’s treatment plant east of town.

“Right now, we have a hodgepodge of pump stations, gravity lines and pressure lines that don’t work together very well,” Oberst said, pointing to decades of retail and other development in the area.

“Builders would say, ‘We do not want to build a gravity line – that’s too expensive.’ So they’d hook up a pressurized line and build a pump station,” Oberst said. “Well, we’re paying for those now. You can’t fault people – it’s good, quality development. But sewer is very expensive to fix. It’s kind of a legacy issue for us.”

How expensive? The latest estimates for the North Interceptor project are $13 million to $14 million – and the city has instead made its top priority another, even costlier large sewer project on the south side of town.

That’s the Southeast Interceptor, which Oberst said “will go up 27 th Street past the hospital, then out to the (treatment) plant” – at a cost of $35 million. One part of that work was done in recent years, before city halted the project amid cost concerns and regrouped, forming a stakeholder advisory committee that came up with a look at short-term, less costly improvements.

And then there’s the timeline: “Even if we started today (on the North Interceptor), it still would be five years” to completion, Oberst said – and there’s “no way – it probably won’t start for five years.”

In its recent reviews, the city has “identified an interim fix” for sewer issues the north end of town, Oberst said, “but the interim fix did not include the kind of development Fred Meyer proposed there. We calculated a much lower density.”

That doesn’t necessarily mean Freddy’s couldn’t proceed – but if it does, Oberst said it faces about $2 million worth of sewer improvements for a short-term fix “the city can’t participate in — because it’s a throwaway cost, we couldn’t justify spending any more on it.”

So what’s a “throwaway cost”? That’s a short-term fix that would have to be torn out when the “real” project happens.

The city’s Grayson said, “If they want to begin their land use process and entitlement process and start doing some of the design, even some of their development, we are willing to do that. We just need to come to a common point in the end where that availability is there for them.”

And then there’s transportation infrastructure – “the traffic issue is another ball of wax,” Oberst said.

A short distance to the east, it was not sewer, but traffic issues – the close-to-failing intersection of Highway 97 and Cooley Road – that stalled Walmart’s controversial plans for a Supercenter several years ago, and also put a big crimp in the city’s plans for its Juniper Ridge development.

Traffic congestion on Highway 97 at Bend’s north end – a busy, lucrative retail spot known for years to developers as the “golden triangle” — also spawned a major, years-long design effort to rework the road network for the north end of Highway 97 in Bend, adding a local access route.

That project design just won federal approval – but now the Oregon Department of Transportation needs to secure the funding to make it happen.

And despite Walmart’s later decision to expand its southern Bend store and add groceries, its long-shelved 97-and-Cooley project isn’t dead either, apparently. Oberst said he talks to a Walmart representative “once in a while.”

Meanwhile, as for the Fred Meyer plans, Oberst said the city must decide, “can we then base our local approval decision on that final (traffic) solution” if it’s not in place or under way.

Some improvements would be needed at Highway 20 and Cooley Road, as you’d expect, but Oberst said there’s also “probably an impact” on the long-standing issues to the east, at 97 and Cooley.

Fred Meyer is the 12th-largest employer in Central Oregon as of this year, with 538 employees, according to new figures from Economic Development for Central Oregon.

Bend’s Fred Meyer store opened in November of 1990 and Redmond’s nine years later. The company now has 132 stores in four Western states, with more than 30,000 employees.

Fred G. Meyer opened his first store in downtown Portland in 1922 with 20 employees and began the trend of one-stop shopping in the early ’30s. Fred Meyer was acquired in 1999 by The Kroger Co. in a $13.5 billion deal.

Alicia Inns will have more on the project on NewsChannel 21 on Thursday night.