The cover of the March 21, 2011, edition of the Northern Nevada Business Weekly.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Each week in 2021, we will feature snippets of stories that published a decade ago to provide readers a 10-year perspective of business news in the region. This week’s stories first published in the March 21, 2011, edition of the NNBW.
How the chambers, EDAWN talks started
Not long after Doug Kurkul announced plans to leave the top executive spot of the Reno-Sparks Chamber of Commerce last autumn, Mary Simmons and Bruce Gescheider placed a call to Len Stevens at the Northern Nevada Chamber of Commerce.
Was it time, they asked the executive director of the Northern Nevada Chamber, to once again talk about combining the two chambers? Simmons, the NV Energy executive who served as chair of the Reno-Sparks Chamber last year, and Gescheider, the owner of Moana Nursery who serves as chair of the group this year, got together with Stevens over breakfast.
The conversation was promising enough they began a series of meetings, involving an ever-widening set of participants, that culminated with last week’s announcement that the two chambers, along with the Economic Development Authority of Western Nevada, are studying some type of combination.
— Page 1, by John Seelmeyer
Meadow Valley Contractors has begun digging the deep excavation along the east side of Highway 395 that will create a new Meadowood interchange.
But the tricky part comes this fall, when swarms of heavy equipment move to the middle of the highway, where they will work in tight spaces constrained by barriers on both sides of the job.
The $21.8 million project will create an underpass that allows for the extension of Meadowood Drive so that it connects Kietzke Lane and South Virginia Street.
Because that section of Highway 395 is elevated, the easier traditional answer — building a new overpass — wasn’t a possibility. Instead, engineers figured how to build an underpass beneath the highway without disrupting the 90,000 cars that whiz by the site each day.
— Page 1, by Rob Sabo
There’s a lot of pain at the corner of Double R Boulevard and Prototype Drive in South Meadows. But a new owner of a little shopping center at a busy intersection hopes the corner may be a story about how a recovery of real estate markets in Northern Nevada might unfold.
Veteran developer Roger Shaheen bought the 37,000-square-foot Double R Galleria on four acres late last year, paying about $3.1 million for the center, along with a small parcel of undeveloped property at the edge of its parking lot.That price tag meant the center lost 70% of its value since it was sold out of bankruptcy in 2006 — at the height of the real estate euphoria — for more than $10.2 million.
Originally developed in 2004 as Magnolia Commons, the center had been caught up in the bankruptcy filing of The Magnolia Companies, a Reno developer of office and retail spaces.
— Page 5, by John Seelmeyer
