Nearly four and a half years have passed since City Market moved its Carbondale operations from the building at the Highway 133-Main Street roundabout north to its new facility in the Carbondale Marketplace shopping center. Since then, the building has sat vacant, mostly stripped to its outer walls and, as many townspeople have noticed, with lights on day and night (more on that later). The Sopris Sun set out to investigate.

We first contacted Lauren Gister, Carbondale’s town manager, to see what she might know. She responded, “We have heard virtually nothing” since there was some talk of an auto-parts store going into part of the space. However, she continued, “We get phone calls all the time” from residents wondering what is happening with the property or offering suggestions for how it could be used. “Nobody wants to see it vacant,” she added.

We next got in touch with SRS Real Estate Partners, which owns and manages the entire old City Market shopping center. SRS is a large nationwide firm that is one of multibillionaire Stan Kroenke’s vast number of enterprises — among them several sports franchises (including the Denver Nuggets and Colorado Avalanche) and scores of shopping centers and other commercial properties. Joe Beck, a senior vice president in the company’s Denver office, spoke with The Sun.

Beck began by echoing Gister’s sentiment that SRS really wants to rent the space, saying, “You want all of the anchor space [like the old City Market] to be occupied” in the shopping center. He then went on to describe the challenges to making that happen, citing two major factors.

The first is the difficulty in determining marketability. Beck said that retailers “can’t understand [a] mountain community” like Carbondale, which has a relatively small population base and is not on a major thoroughfare like I-70 (despite the traffic volume on 133). He added, “Most retailers rely on demographics and can’t take into account part-time residents,” a common dynamic in the Valley. That seems to have factored into the unsuccessful negotiations with the auto-parts company as well as with Trader Joe’s, which reportedly explored the possibility of occupying the vacant (since 2019) Safeway store in Glenwood Springs – also an SRS property.

In addition to the retailers’ hesitancy, there has long been community concern about and opposition to a big-box store presence in Carbondale, meaning that the landlord has to consider dividing up these large, vacant buildings; the old City Market has some 45,000 square feet of floor space. However, Beck said, “The cost of splitting up space in mountain towns is prohibitive — a staggering number.” One does not simply put up a wall between the two halves: a considerable amount of infrastructure (utilities, heating and cooling, etc.) must be also installed in each new unit. In the case of the old City Market, that may run to some $2 million or so.

Nonetheless, SRS has had to pursue dividing those buildings, and in January they had success leasing a portion of the old Safeway store to Harbor Freight Tools. Beck mentioned the relief at finalizing the intense negotiations, citing “deal fatigue.” There had been talk that Sprouts Farmers Market also might be moving into the building, but Beck indicated in an email to The Sun that the Sprouts deal “was dead.”

As for the old City Market, SRS had discussions early on with Lift-Up, the region’s food-assistance organization, which envisioned the space as a centralized food-distribution hub for the entire Parachute-Aspen corridor, as well as potentially for other uses, such as an indoor farmers’ market. It is unclear what became of that plan. Beck would not comment, and The Sun was unable to talk with anyone from Lift-Up. However, John Dougherty of Human Service Innovations, who is currently consulting for Lift-Up, said in an email that the possibility of the organization using the City Market space “quickly fell off the table early on in discussions, from what I know.”

More recently, there have been discussions with the Ace Hardware in the shopping center. The store, currently owned by Vicki and Chris Peterson, is in the process of being acquired by Tom and Jenn Mortell of Telluride. In a phone call, Tom Mortell told The Sun that SRS had approached the Petersons and, subsequently, he and Jen about the hardware store taking over half of the City Market space. This would be a significant increase in floor area from its current stand-alone building.

Mortell cited “positives and negatives to both sides of the coin” on the possibility. He said they are “interested potentially, but we have no idea how to break up the space” in the old store, so, at this point, “Nothing is written in stone.”

As for the overhead lights being on 24/7 in the old store (some one-fourth of the total number of lights), Beck said they are on for security reasons. The sad reality is that these large, empty buildings are targets for vandalism and theft. Beck mentioned there had been some of that problem at the Safeway location.

He added, as the conversation ended, “We would like to get a deal [on the building] that the town loves.”