Shur Valu Market, Ignacio’s only grocery store, will close by the end of the month.
Ezra and Brook Lee, in partnership with the McClanahan family – which originally owned and operated the Shur Valu for about 25 years – plan to demolish the existing building and open a new grocery store in the same location, said Brook Lee, who lives in Ignacio.
The plan is to open in the fourth quarter of this year, she said.
“We realize the need, and we will do everything in our power to get the store open as quickly as possible,” Brook Lee said.
The new grocery store will have a pharmacy, “something this town badly needs,” said Emily Meisner, owner of Ignacio’s Patio Restaurant and former president of the Ignacio Chamber of Commerce.
But she said locals fear that going nine months without a local grocery store will be a blow to the town’s economy and mean municipal government loses one of its most important sources of sales tax.
“The new grocery store is supposed to be spectacular,” she said.
“But that’s an anchor tenant in our town. We fear its going to effect us in a negative way in the short term, but hopefully it won’t be too stifling,” she said.
Meisner said locals were planning to cope with the loss of a grocery store in various ways, saying local convenience stores were preparing to stock up on basic food goods for the foreseeable future.
In the meantime, most Ignacio residents probably will have to shop for themselves and their families in Bayfield, which is eight miles away.
Southern Ute Community Action Program is organizing special shuttles to ferry locals without cars – many of them elderly – to Bayfield’s supermarket once or twice per week.
Still, the next few months are bound to be inconvenient, Meisner said.
“People are just used to stopping and grabbing what they need,” she said.
cmcallister@durangoherald.com
