The City of Ralston has hired a consulting firm to conduct a telephone consumer survey in its effort to attract a Menards home improvement store to 72nd and L Streets.
The city wants to see if it can persuade Menards to build in Ralston if that store can compete with existing stores.
“This is going to give us a little education,” Mayor Don Groesser said. “We’ve been saying to Menards for a while that we think we’ve got a great location for them at 72nd and L.”
The city wants the store to help fund its planned 3,500-seat sports arena in the area. Part of the financing plan for the facility calls for using sales taxes generated in an area around the site to pay for the development.
As part of the so-called turnback tax legislation passed in 2010, cities wishing to build projects like Ralston’s can capture up to 70 percent of sales tax from retail outlets in a 600-yard radius from the facility, provided those stores opened two years prior to or two years following the opening of the facility. Cities are eligible for the turnback tax funding for 20 years after the facility’s opening.
The average Menards outlet does about $40 million in sales annually. Groesser has said that to pay off bonds for the planned arena — a projected $29 million — the city would need retail outlets in the 600-yard radius to do roughly $55 million in business each year.
A special meeting of the Ralston City Council is planned Tuesday, when Groesser will be asking the council to approve the overall arena project and to authorize him to pursue $29 million in bonds to finance the construction.
Ralston’s actions at the meeting eventually will serve as a presentation to the governor, who must approve the project before Ralston voters are asked May 10 whether they approve the bonds being issued.
Also at the Tuesday meeting, the mayor will give a presentation on the feasibility of the project with a Menards at 72nd and L and the prospect of the project without a Menards store.
The home improvement retailer has expressed concern about the location, given its stores near Cornhusker and the Kennedy Freeway in Bellevue and at 120th Street and West Dodge Road in Omaha. Both stores are more than eight miles from the proposed Ralston location.
“It’s the development community’s belief that a Menards there will have an impact on Lowe’s and Home Depot, rather than cannibalizing from the other two Menards locations,” said Walt Peffer, an adviser to Ralston on its planned sports and entertainment complex.
Ralston has hired Red State Strategies to devise and execute the telephone survey to gauge, among other things, the likelihood of those polled to shop at a Menards at 72nd and L Streets and the home improvement store preference of those polled.
The survey also will ask about the likelihood of those polled to use Ralston’s proposed sports and entertainment complex and try to measure support for the city’s project.
Red State Strategies said a minimum of 500 respondents on the telephone survey would be necessary to take an accurate reading. The pricetag on the survey is $9,500. The city has built the cost into its bonding budget for the overall arena project.
The survey is being conducted over the next week, and results may be available for the special Tuesday council meeting.
Following Tuesday’s meeting, Groesser said, he will contact officials from the Eau Claire, Wis.-based Menards to discuss the survey results.
“We hope this is what they’re looking for to move forward,” he said.
Copyright ©2012 Omaha World-Herald®. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, displayed or redistributed for any purpose without permission from the Omaha World-Herald.
