New commercial project breaks ground in Imperial
IMPERIAL – A fouracre lot at 15th Street and Imperial Avenue will soon be home to a new post office and a new 7-Eleven, as well as to a restaurant to be named later.
Mayor Darrell Pechtl and other city officials were joined by the lead developer and others for a ground-breaking ceremony to mark the birth of the Imperial Gateway Center across the street from Frank Wright Middle School.
The property was deeded to the city when Caltrans relinquished Highway 86 to Imperial in 2016. The city rezoned the parcel to commercial in 2017 to allow for retail development to begin on the north side of the city.
Following this, the city entered an agreement to sell the property to Halferty Development Co./5th Street Imperial,
LLC for full appraised value.
Chris Peto, with 5th Street Development, was first introduced to the Imperial Valley five years ago and has worked on several economic opportunities in the area, Imperial Assistant City Manager Alexis
Brown said. Following a meeting with city representatives in 2017 at the International Council of Shopping Centers event in Las Vegas, Peto began working with commercial real estate broker Lee & Associates to recruit tenants to the location.
The U.S. Postal Service confirmed it would be one of the center’s new tenants in June. The building the post office currently occupies at 116 N. Imperial Ave. is leased, and USPS said the owner would not renew the lease.
USPS also has said a move is necessary because it has outgrown the current space. The new location will more than double the present facility’s square footage.
The other confirmed tenant, 7-Eleven, will occupy a 3,000-squarefoot store on the south end of the parcel. There were will be three gas pump stations on the grounds with a total of 12 pumps.
Plans also call for a 4,365-square-foot building with a drive-thru situated in the middle section of the parcel. A tenant for that building has not been announced.
Peto said progress at the site will come pretty quickly with the start of construction. He said he expects the shells of the buildings to be up by March or April, after which it will be up to the tenants to take over and finish them off according to their needs.
“This was the right area at the right time,”
Peto said. “The last year has been very tough for a lot of people. It’s been the fortitude and help of everyone involved that shows why we’re here breaking ground today.”
Mayor Darrell Pechtl said the building site has historically been “just a dust bowl” on the edge of town. He said he foresees the project helping spur additional development on the Highway 86 corridor.
“This is an area where these kinds of projects do well,” he said.