A new full-service grocery store may be in the future for 27th Street and Reed Market Road in southeast Bend, if a local landowner can jump through enough development hoops to make it happen.

Matt Steele says he wants to build a 34,000-square-foot grocery building on land he and his family own on the intersection’s southwest corner.

A store that size would be on par with the west-side Ray’s Food Place on Century Drive, Steele said.

Putting another store on the underserved east side would take more than 1,800 traffic miles off city streets every day by keeping more grocery customers in their own neighborhood, according to Steele’s preliminary traffic analysis.

It also would ease crowding in the east side’s only other mainstream grocery store, a Safeway in The Forum Shopping Center on U.S. Highway 20 and 27th Street.

The idea has drawn interest from several grocery chains, including some already in town, Steele said. But he declined to name any at this point, citing a development process that needs to go through several steps before any new store can rise above the canal bank.

His best guess on the time frame: about two years.

The first step: A rezone.

Currently, Steele’s corner is zoned for low-density residential development.

He has requested a rezone to a convenience-commercial designation, which would open it to use for a grocery store, along with other potential types of neighborhood-service retail operations.

A public hearing is set for June 22 at 7 p.m. in the City Council Chambers, 710 N.W. Wall St., on the rezone request.

The rezone, though, is unlikely to be the tallest hurdle the new development will face, Steele said.

The corner already is designated on the city’s general planning maps – which expresses city planners’ long-term goals – as a commercial corner, with neighborhood stores to serve the southeast section of the city.

Among the bigger issues is Reed Market Road’s traffic problems.

Reed Market currently dead-ends into 27th Street after a cross-town journey that starts at west Bend’s Century Drive and crosses the Deschutes River, the Bend Parkway and busy Third Street. Along that route, the street runs through some of the city’s busiest and most dysfunctional intersections.

City traffic engineers are leaning toward installing multilane roundabouts on some of Reed Market’s key intersections to ease the flow, along with installation of a railroad overpass at Ninth Street; the extension of side roads to ease traffic flow away from Reed Market; and the widening of Reed Market through several sections, with the installation of medians in some key areas.

Steele said his store could help the area’s traffic situation. More than 5,700 residential units would be closer to the store than they would be to any of the city’s other major grocery outlets, according to a traffic study produced by Steele.

Numbers produced by the Institute of Transportation Engineers, which are used widely by traffic engineers to estimate development impacts, indicate that a 34,000-square-foot store would generate about 2,615 market trips per day, on average.

According to Steele’s analysis, running those trips from nearby neighborhoods to the new store, rather than to the east-side Safeway or the South Third Street Fred Meyer or Albertsons, would take about 1,868 traffic miles off of city streets, every day.

In order to shepherd a new grocery store safely through to completion, Steele said he needs a change in development rules that would allow him to move the store’s building away from the street, rather than backing it up to the corner as current rules would require.

That rule change could be made as early as this summer.

He said he also needs traffic planners to drop plans for putting a median in the middle of the street at the Reed Market-27th Street intersection. Or, failing that, to replace the traffic light with a roundabout.

The new store, Steele said, would have to pay around $500,000 in development charges to the city, including more than $400,000 for general street improvements.

The idea of a new grocery store seems popular with the neighborhood.

Nan Loveland, chair of the nearby Old Farm District Neighborhood Association, said she doesn’t have any problems with the way the proposed development is configured, except for relatively minor ”logistical issues” that can be worked out through the development process.

”We do most of our shopping at Fred Meyer,” Loveland said. ”But I wouldn’t mind getting a Ray’s over here.”

Steele, a development engineer and principal with Hickman, Williams and Associates Inc., of Bend, has had a hand in developing several local shopping centers through the years, including the south Bend Albertsons and Pinebrook Plaza; the south Bend Fred Meyer complex; the Century Plaza development around the west Bend Safeway; and Redmond’s new Nolan Town Center, with its anchor Ray’s Food Place.

He mailed surveys to 500 southeast Bend households prior to a neighborhood meeting on the project in February. Of the 123 who responded, 81 listed a new grocery store as their No. 1 choice for the corner, beating by a wide margin the other development choices – a bank, pharmacy, florist, video store, coffee shop or other small retailers.

Public hearing june 22

* A mandatory public hearing is set for June 22 at 7 p.m. in the City Council Chambers, 710 N.W. Wall St., on the rezone request.