Walgreens project clears first hurdle

By next summer, downtown Moorhead may be home to a new Walgreens drug store.

A Minneapolis-based developer plans to build a stand-alone Walgreens where the Arvid Benson Home Furnishings store now stands in the 900 block of Main Avenue.

Premiere Video, 810 Main Ave., will be razed to make room for a parking lot, said Howard Bergerud, president of Semper Development.

If the project is approved by the city, Bergerud said the furniture store will be torn down in 60 to 90 days.

Construction of the store, expected to take about seven months, would begin immediately after the Arvid Benson building comes down, he said.

Semper expects to close the deals to buy the furniture and video stores by the end of the month, he said.

Bergerud declined to say how much the project will cost.

Beth Grosen, the city's business development specialist, said the drug store will be a good thing for the Main Avenue corridor.

The store would be the first stand-alone Walgreens in the metro area, she said.

"That has been an important, well-sought after retailer," Grosen said of Walgreens.

The project leaped its first hurdle Tuesday when it got the unanimous backing of the city's planning board.

The only issue that worried some board members is the potential for a spike in traffic that would make the already busy junction of Eighth Street and Main Avenue even worse.

John Kohler, an architect from Semper who attended the planning meeting, said the drug store will likely draw an even crowd throughout the day, which will lessen the effect on area intersections.

"It'll be more of a trickle of traffic all day," he said.

Besides recommending approval of the plat and a zoning change, the planning board signed off on a request to vacate a dead-end section of Ninth Street South that splits the two-block area.

The City Council, which has the final say on approving the project, will likely consider the plans later this month.

Unless the project hits a snag with the city, the store should be open in May or June 2006, Bergerud said.

When the new store opens, Moorhead's existing Walgreens, which leases space at 110 11th St. S., will close, he said.

It is unclear whether Premiere Video will open in a new Moorhead location. A call to United Entertainment, the St. Cloud, Minn., corporation that owns the business, was not returned Tuesday.

The furniture store, started by its namesake in 1949, closed in November.

The project will not affect the Dairy Queen just west of the proposed store.

Owner Troy DeLeon said he hopes the drug store will increase his business, but even if it doesn't, he'll be happy with the new neighbor.

"With us, parking is a big issue. This will open that up quite a bit," he said.

Bergerud, whose firm has built about 300 Walgreens nationwide, said the Illinois-based drug store began focusing on stand-alone stores with drive-through pharmacies in the early 1990s.

"Today, that's about all they do," he said.

Walgreens has been on a building frenzy in recent years, constructing 436 new stores in 2004 and planning another 450 new ones this year. Of the company's 4,800 stores, about half are less than 5 years old, according to its corporate Web site.

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