A long-awaited grocery store on South Park Street is about to sign a lease.
“I think, subject to any legal jargon, we’ll probably sign a lease in about a week,” Kristie Maurer, the grocery store’s owner, said Aug. 19 at a Zoom meeting of the South Metropolitan Planning Council, a coalition of south Madison neighborhood and business groups.
Maurer’s Urban Market is scheduled to open in late 2023 on the ground floor of the Park Cedar Apartments. Maurer will lease the urban store space and manage operations. Maurer committed to operating the grocery store in 2022 after Luna’s Groceries pulled out in 2021.
Once Maurer signs the lease, the city will finalize financing and Maurer’s team can begin construction. Maurer said she hopes to begin construction within two months and have the store open in late spring or early summer of 2025.
Legal negotiations over the lease are the final hurdle for the project, Dan Rolfs, real estate development manager for the city of Madison, said at the meeting. He acknowledged that the process has been challenging: “If we sat down and had a beer, we would be completely drunk going through all the issues that have arisen with this project.”
Those issues include design challenges and a funding gap; in May, the City Council approved an additional $1 million for retail space improvements.
City officials and residents began planning a new grocery store on Park Street five years ago when the Pick ‘n Save at 1312 Park Street, a block from the Park Cedar Apartments, was expected to close. They feared the area would become a food desert with no more neighborhood stores offering affordable and nutritious food.
However, Pick ‘n Save has extended its lease until 2022, which the property owner sees as a decline in the store’s profitability. It is still uncertain whether the store will close once Maurer’s opens, and a number of residents asked at the South Metropolitan Planning Council meeting about the potential of competing grocery stores in the area.
A resident who introduced herself on Zoom as Linda B. referred to a isthmus A February 2024 article quoted Kurt Welton, who owns the property where Pick ‘n Save operates, as saying, “I’m going to let Kroger decide when they want to close.” A Kroger representative was noncommittal about a closure at the time.
“It’s been a very frustrating process to watch this drag on over the years,” said Linda B. “I think someone should get feedback on what the owner of Pick ‘n Save is up to and what he plans to do.”
Maurer said she had no further information. “I’ve run through several scenarios to figure out how it’s going to go if they decide to stay open or if they close, and nobody knows except Pick ‘n Save,” she said. “Unfortunately, they’re not very transparent, so we’re not sure what that’s going to look like.”
The city has committed $9.1 million to the grocery store project over the past four years: $4.6 million to purchase the space in 2021, $3.5 million for tenant and grocery store improvements in 2023 and another $1 million for tenant improvements in May 2024. City officials hope to recoup as much of the cost of the $1 million tenant improvements in May 2024 as possible through future payments from developers Rule Enterprises and Movin’ Out, according to an April 10 letter from Rolfs to all city council members.
Rolfs tells isthmus The details are still being worked out, but the developers have agreed to cover part of the costs.
At the meeting, Rolfs expressed his hope that the long-awaited completion of the project was imminent.
“So there’s a lot going on, but I have to say that from the city’s perspective, we’re in a pretty reasonable position – God willing and the creek doesn’t swell – to get that lease done as quickly as possible in the next week or so,” Rolfs said. “And then, as Kristie noted, we can start financing, designing and building as soon as possible.”
