COMMERCE CITY – Anthony Stellato knows firsthand that true New Yorkers are bred with an innate mix of resourcefulness, grit and determination.
That’s why the Long Island native believes he was able to find and start a job with a bank only three weeks after he moved to Colorado in 2004.
“I was always able to stay a step ahead of a lot people because we had to in New York. It was so competitive,” he said.
And when Stellato, 40, started looking around at the dearth of restaurants, a grocery store or even a bar in his new hometown, he decided he’d take matters into his own hands, with a New York flair, of course.
“What we are is a real New York deli,” Stellato said as he settles into a seat in a quaint corner of his namesake deli and grocery that he opened about a month ago. “You’re not going to see this anywhere else in Colorado. You have everything. You have groceries. You have specialty items. You have bread and milk and just a normal deli.”
It’s a slice of home for Stellato.
“There is nowhere you can get good food out here,” he said. “Being a New Yorker, you miss the pizza, you miss the bagels. Then you really miss the ethnic foods and such. I sell lasagna where I make the noodles fresh, the meatballs fresh, everything fresh and you put it together. I can’t keep them in stock.”
Stellato realizes his business, especially its grocery aspect, also fills a void in Commerce City’s Northern Range area where the retail necessities that residents depend on have been slow to match the population boom the area has seen over the past decade.
“You have a pretty big development up here, you’ve got 8,000, 8,500 or whatever, houses but there’s no grocery in Commerce City that’s convenient,” he said. “Everyone goes to Brighton, everyone goes down to Denver, Green Valley Ranch.”
Jerry Flannery sees the problem of residents fleeing their hometown for basic commodities, like groceries, full circle. First, from a convenience sake, as a Reunion resident and, second, from a economic perspective, as a city manager worried about powerful spending money trickling into the coffers of other communities.
“First and foremost, it’s the public service component. (Residents) deserve to have retail close by. They absolutely deserve that. That’s why they bought there. That’s why it’s a master plan community.”
Flannery admits that, without the retail and commercial element, the “live, work, play” mantra is missing one of its key components.
“When the shop and work are a lot less, that revenue that’s generated by that business does go to other places,” he said. “And that’s something that, as a city, it’s a successful community if it has all those things. The sales tax and the revenue that’s generated to the city is really a trickle down from a successful project. It’s more critical to get those occupants and get that cycle of economic development going than necessarily the revenue. The revenue is important to us, by all means. But it’s more important to us to get that business started and running and successful so that community is successful and the tax base will grow from there.”
No more did the pent-up demand for new development, especially retail, become clear last year when Flannery the resident and Flannery the city manager could rarely escape the daily barrage of questions of when Wal-Mart would finally begin construction on its planned store at the corner of 104th Avenue and Tower Road.
The city had a long-term agreement, through January 2012, with Wal-Mart to build on the site and the company owned the land.
But, with the questions coming, the clock ticking on the intensive planning and development process and Wal-Mart silent, Flannery decided it was time to directly ask the mega retail chain last year about its plans. Flannery admits that the letter he sent to Wal-Mart asking them to clarify if they still planned to build in the Northern Range wasn’t the normal de rigueur of the cautious, almost apologetic tap dance of working with companies interested in locating to a community.
Flannery the resident convinced Flannery the city manager the issue was too important for the community to wait for an answer any longer.
“It got to a point where the citizens in the Northern Range, and I’m one of them, deserved an answer,” he said. “The silence really was the answer in my opinion.”
Flannery said Wal-Mart did finally send correspondence to the city in the past month, acknowledging what city leaders had began to suspect, they would not be able to meet the January 2012 timeline.
Come the start of next year, Flannery said the agreement will cease to exist. Should Wal-Mart, which still owns the land, renew its interest in building at the location, they will have to reach a new incentive agreement with Commerce City.
While the likelihood of a Wal-Mart fizzled, talks with the Kroger Co. about where their plans stood to build a King Soopers grocery store at the northeast corner of 104th Avenue and Chambers Road sparked. The city presented its incentive package and zoning case to King Soopers in December, and the company has submitted its building plans.
“I think they are looking at foundations and footings, those types of things in August per our incentive agreement,” he said of the 123,000-square-foot store, which will include a gas station.
Flannery said, unlike the six-year Wal-Mart incentive agreement, which pre-dated his time as city manager, Kroger agreed to a much shorter turnaround time frame for development.
“Come August when dirt starts moving, I’ll probably breathe more of a sigh of relief,” he said.
The looming construction of the grocery store could seem like a premature death knell for the fledging Stellato’s. Not so, its owner says.
“I won’t have to carry produce anymore,” he said. “I can get rid of half my aisles, I can get rid of all the groceries. I can just focus on specialties, put in chairs, tables and make it a real eatery.”
True to that New York way of thinking, Stellato is already one step ahead.
Contact Kevin Denke at 303-659-2522, ext. 225 or kdenke@metrowestnewspapers.com