New Town Gym Plans Move Forward as Opus 9 Owner Parks in Protest

By Desiree Parker Tuesday, February 01, 2011

Opus 9 owner Steve Lewis’s white BMW was surrounded Monday morning with the crumbled remains of parking lot asphalt.

One scooped-out path from a large excavator ended perilously close to his front tire.

When Lewis arrived at his restaurant Monday morning, the entire rear lot of his building was blocked off and a construction crew had begun removing asphalt just in front of the Opus 9 back door to make room for a 15,000-square-foot expansion of the space next to his restaurant. Lewis parked his car in the way of the construction equipment as a symbolic protest, which he plans to follow up with a legal one.

The 23,000-square-foot retail space beside Opus 9 was recently leased to American Family Fitness gym. The building is being extended into the rear parking lot to accommodate the gym, and the addition will take up around 60 parking spaces. About 20 spaces will be added soon to the area around the gazebo to meet parking space requirements.

What drove Lewis to action Monday was a combination factors: the developer's silence about the plans, and Lewis' concern for guests who fill the restaurant especially during lunch hours, many of whom are older and find it difficult to walk from a faraway parking space to the front door of the business.

Even with the new spaces, restaurant guests will be competing with patrons of the gym for fewer spaces. “We got 22 spaces, and we lose more than sixty?” Lewis says. He is glad that there will be more parking added near Opus 9, but wishes they’d been added first and not months later.

While construction is going on, most of the rear parking lot on the restaurant’s block will be closed not just to patrons, but also to the several delivery trucks that bring supplies to Opus 9 five days a week, according to restaurant General Manager Steve Smith. Trucks will need to park and unload further away.

Aside from his concerns about parking, Lewis feels that Developers Realty, the owner of the Shops on Main Street and a few other buildings in New Town, didn’t give him or his staff enough notice about the project.

According to Lewis, one of his staff received a call around 7 p.m. Tuesday from Developers Realty letting them know not to park in the rear of the building beginning this week. No one returned phone calls he made to the company afterwards to answer questions about the matter, “and I’ve had no response since,” he says.

The New Town Commercial Association, an organization that represents all the business owners in New Town, sent an email Friday afternoon to businesses in the development letting them know about the construction.

The plan is to have the project completed in four to six months, according to the email, and the “materials, equipment, and traffic will be tightly constrained to the immediate area with the intention of minimizing disruption to New Town businesses and maximizing parking for customers, clients, and employees.”

Nathan Shor, leasing agent for New Town’s Shops on Main Street, points out that the expansion plan was approved by the New Town design review board, and that the project met all the county’s requirements for adequate parking spaces.

The new spaces, he says, will be in a good location (at the end of Main Street) and “will benefit everyone.”

Shor also says that the new gym, once complete, “will be an asset to Main Street shops and the community as a whole.”

The gym construction, though, is far from complete. Monday was only groundbreaking day.

WYDaily asked Lewis how he planned to get his car around the torn-up pavement. He wasn’t really sure, he said. Smith joked that his boss could drive over the sidewalk and through the grass on the other side of the building.

“Once the lot is torn up, there’s pretty much nothing else to do,” Lewis says. Except call his lawyer.

Tomorrow in WYDaily: Frustrations about the gym boil over for some New Town business owners.