Louisville approves $15M in incentives for King Soopers to take over shuttered Lowe’s

LOUISVILLE — Louisville city officials approved a tax- and fee-incentives package on Tuesday evening worth nearly $15.3 million in an effort to entice King Soopers into moving into the shuttered Lowe’s Home Improvement store at 1171 Dillon Road.

The 118,000-square-foot grocery store would be a King Sooper Marketplace concept, which is larger than a typical King Soopers store and offers a variety of goods beyond groceries, with a gas station. 

“There aren’t a lot of opportunities to attract businesses quite like this,” Louisville mayor Chris Leh said.  “… This is going to be a neighborhood grocery store for a lot of people.”

Should King Soopers move forward with its plans, the company “would invest $15.7 million dollars in infrastructure on the site to rehabilitate the building for the new use,” according to a city memo. 

The planned grocery store, which could be open by mid-2026, would hire “75 full time employees and 175 part-time employees, with an annual payroll of over $6.75 million,” the memo said. 

After the newly approved rebates are provided, King Soopers is expected to account for nearly $22.9 million in tax and fee revenue over the 12-year period when the incentives would be available.

“Staff anticipates this new King Soopers Marketplace being one of the top sales tax generating entities in the City,” a Louisville memo said. “The fiscal impact could be significant with the City retaining nearly $1 million a year to start and upwards of $4 million into perpetuity once the incentive agreement terminates.”

While the approval of the incentive package was unanimous, members of the Louisville City Council did have questions about the potential “cannibalization” of another nearby King Soopers on East South Boulder Road. 

King Soopers senior real estate manager Nick Tompkins said that the company does not intend to close the existing store when the Dillon Road location opens. 

“We know that the shopping experience (at the existing Louisville King Soopers) is right about on the edge of a point where it’s not the shopping experience we want our customers to have,” he said. “The store is getting very busy.”

The East South Boulder Road store “has been on our radar for needing some relief,” Tompkins said. 

The former Lowe’s building is only about a half-mile from a Safeway on West Cherry Street. Safeway is a grocery store brand owned by Albertsons Cos. (NYSE: ACI), which is seeking a merger with King Soopers’ parent company Kroger Co. (NYSE: KR). 

Should the deal, which faces several legal challenges, come to fruition, Albertsons has vowed to sell off nearly 600 stores to C&S Wholesale Grocers Inc. in an effort to assuage regulators’ concerns over antitrust issues related to the consolidation of two of the nation’s largest grocery-store operators. The Cherry Street Safeway location is among those that would be sold. 

City officials said they were pleasantly surprised by the speed at which King Soopers has developed its plan to take over the ex-Lowe’s building.

The site was previously slated for redevelopment into a flex-industrial space catering to biotechnology companies. Denver-based developer Koelbel and Co. recently formed a joint venture with Vitrian, a Maryland builder of biotechnology spaces, to develop the Centennial Valley Innovation Center on former Lowe’s property.

It’s unclear why this plan appears to have changed. Koelbel and Co. did not provide BizWest with answers to questions about the Centennial Valley Innovation Center project prior to publication.