June 2017
Volume 16 • Issue 6
Retirement prompts owners to sell Cedars Restaurant BY JEFF MORROW
for Tri-Cities Area Journal of Business
Manufacturing
American Wheel Specialist acquires powder-coating business Page 13
Real Estate & Construction
Two new gyms open, offer month-to-month memberships Page 23
Agriculture
Prosser Farm supplies crops to Tom Douglas Restaurants page 43
She Said It “We’d like to see more manufacturing. More manufacturing brings greater employment.” -Mayra Reyna, director of properties, Port of Pasco Page 19
Dave Mitcham has been in the restaurant business for 45 years. He says that’s enough. Mitcham and his wife, Darci, have put Cedars Restaurant on the market after owning it for 11 years. The asking price for their waterfront restaurant on Kennewick’s Clover Island Inn is $2.62 million. Rob Ellsworth and Scott Sautell of SVN/ Retter & Company are handling the sale. The Mitchams, who said they received a lot of interest from potential buyers, started thinking about an exit strategy a few years ago. “I wanted to get out about the time I turned 60,” said Dave Mitcham, who turns 62 this year and is a few years behind his goal. “My friends wonder how in the hell I’ve stayed in the restaurant business all of these years. I’ve done every position in this place. Darci is the office manager. (The restaurant business) is what I know.” Cedars is in the 12th year of a 35-year land lease with the Port of Kennewick. It sits on nearly a third of an acre with views of the Columbia River and cable bridge. The 8,600-square-foot restaurant was built in 1977. It was renovated in 1999 after a dumpster fire caused smoke and water damage. The renovation, which included work to make it compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act, cost $2.25 million. Dave Mitcham grew up in the restaurant industry. He began working in a small north Idaho restaurant when he was 13 years old. At 15, he worked at Cedars Floating Restaurant in Coeur d’Alene as a dishwasher. Ray Gillett, who owned six different Cedars restaurants at the time, kept moving him up the ladder into different positions, including cook, until finally sending the teen to the new Kennewick restaurant to be the kitchen manager in 1975. “(The Kennewick Cedars) was the last one he owned,” Dave Mitcham said. By 1983, Mitcham said, his boss had set up a profit-sharing program. He took his annual profit-sharing check and invested it for the next 20 years. uCEDARS, Page 4
Lemon Grass Gifts owner Linda Pasco snaps a photo while a new sign for her store is installed at Marineland Plaza at 5215 W. Clearwater Ave. in Kennewick. A major remodel of the 30-year-old retail plaza has encouraged businesses to move in and longtime tenants to make improvements.
Remodeled Kennewick shopping plaza attracts new tenants BY ROBIN WOJTANIK
for Tri-Cities Area Journal of Business
For the first time in two decades, all but one storefront is occupied at Kennewick’s Marineland Plaza. Following a major remodel of the façade, every spot on the West Clearwater Avenue side of the shopping center is booked, and just one space remains available for lease on the North Edison Street side — the area where The Bookworm used to be. “It’s a good surprise to be almost full,” said Jason Goffard, a commercial real estate broker with NAI Tri-Cities. “There are very few business plazas around town that are 100 percent.”
He’s been the broker for the retail space, once called Marineland Village, through its prior ownership and bank possession, handling all leases and renewals for the spaces there. Marineland is now owned by a local group of investors, with Manuel Chavallo as the majority managing member. Chavallo’s team, Clearwater Professional Suites LLC, invested $700,000 for the façade remodel. The property opened in 1987 and had not been remodeled since. The dolphin statues and swan signs were removed and replaced with modern awnings and a copper roof. uMARINELAND, Page 37
R.E. Powell expands in Tri-Cities, buys $4.45M building in Richland BY JESSICA HOEFER
for Tri-Cities Area Journal of Business
R.E. Powell, a distributor of fuels and lubricants, has expanded its presence in the Tri-Cities by buying a three-story office building in Richland. In late April 2017, the company bought a 46,800-square-foot building for $4.45 million at 1060 Jadwin Ave. The Grandview-based company had been leasing the building since fall 2016 after outgrowing its facility at 151 Commercial Ave. in Pasco. “We’ve been expanding the office space over there to accommodate our Tri-Cities team members, but we realized we’d need to invest in office space to meet those needs,” said Tony Christensen, who joined
the business in 2001 and now serves as president and chief operating officer. “We have 40 team members in Grandview, and about 10 who were working out of the Pasco office. We’ve moved some of those people out of Pasco and some of our team members in Grandview have relocated to Jadwin. Today we have about 20 team members working out of the Jadwin office.” Christensen Inc. is the parent company of several businesses focused primarily on the distribution of fuel, lubricants and propane, including R.E. Powell Distributing, SeaPort Petroleum in Seattle and Don Thomas Petroleum in Portland. The company also owns Mid Valley Chrysler Dodge Jeep and Ram in Grandview. uR.E. POWELL, Page 24
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