New retailer: Break to competitor unfair

Stu Utgaard wants one thing to be perfectly clear: Unlike a big competitor, his Sportsman's Warehouse didn't need a state tax break to entice it to open in Reno.

In fact, he thinks the state tax break available to Cabela's gives his competitor an unfair advantage.

Sportsman's Warehouse said last week it leased half the former Target Building at Moana Lane and South Kietzke.

The company founded in Midvale, Utah, plans to open a store in the approximately 53,000-square-foot space in March.

The company's announcement came on the state Legislature action this year to write a sales tax break that might apply to Cabela's, which is rumored to be studying a location east of Sparks for one of its outdoors mega-stores.

The tax break would allow stores such Cabela's to divert a portion of the sales tax generated by the store away from the state's general fund and into payment for infrastructure such as roads.

The break applies only to companies that generate more than half their sales from out-ofstate tourists.

Utgaard said the tax break is particularly annoying because J.P.

Morgan Chase & Co., the giant New York investment house, holds a 20 percent stake in Cabela's and is looking to buy more.

Sportsman's Warehouse, on the other hand, is owned by Utgaard and his family.

It's not, however, a mom-and-pop operation.

When it opens, the Reno store will be the 20th for Sportsman's Warehouse.

The company plans to open four stores in 2003 alone.

Most of the company's 18 stores are in the Rockies and the Northwest, with a couple of outposts in the Upper Midwest.

Each carries a big inventory of camping, hunting and fishing equipment along with other outdoor-oriented sporting goods.

The company said it carries 1,000 firearms, more than 100 models of tents, more than 150 types of binoculars and spotting scopes, and 80,000 flies for fishing.

"Reno is a good outdoors market," Utgaard said.

"It's a good hunting market and a good fishing market."

The store, he said, will employ 65 to 75 employees most of them fulltime after an extensive renovation is completed.

The original Sportsman's Warehouse store in Midvale, Utah, was launched in 1986 and purchased by Utgaard and his family in 1996.Two years later, they set off on an aggressive expansion program.

The company today operates some 800,000 square feet of retail space, and its employment totals more than 1,000.

The Sportsman's Warehouse lease of the former Target space takes a goodsized bite out of one of the largest retail vacancies in the Truckee Meadows.

The store has stood vacant since Target moved to a larger location at 6845 Sierra Center .