Hardee’s closes for good
Hardee's restaurant, a longtime fixture on Highway 74 just south of Main Street, closed its doors for good last Saturday, Dec. 20.
Hardee's restaurant, a longtime fixture on Highway 74 just south of Main Street, closed its doors for good last Saturday, Dec. 20.
“It was a shock when I got the call Sunday morning,” Barb Packard, the restaurant’s biscuit maker, recalled in a phone conversation last week. She stopped in later that morning “and had a good cry with Tracy (Cook, the restaurant’s manger).”
Employees, customers and community leaders blame the new traffic island on Highway 74, part of the state’s recent reconstruction project, which forces anyone leaving the parking lot to turn right regardless of which way they want to go.
If they’re right, then Hardee’s is the second restaurant on that corner to disappear in the wake of the road project. Steve Berger’s Olde Templeton Inn was demolished at the project’s outset to make way for the widened intersection.
Sussex village historian Fred Keller said he thought the village’s business activity had been moving off of Main Street and its side streets westward to Highway 164.
“McDonald’s coming to town (on 164) might have hurt us, too,” Packard said. “My own group of seniors used to meet at Hardee’s every morning except Sunday when we went to church. But because of the boulevard, now we all meet at McDonald’s at the other end of Main Street.”
“There’s just more traffic on Highway 164,” said Sussex businessman Chris Zuzick, a former president of the Sussex Area Chamber of Commerce, after ticking off the names of the fast-food restaurants there: Culver’s, MacDonald’s and Starbucks.
Starbucks also has only one way in and out, he noted, just like Hardee’s. “There’s not a lot of selling they have to do. They just pick off the low-hanging fruit.”
The key to the eastern end of Main Street, he said, is the old Mammoth Spring Canning Co. property, which has remained undeveloped since the company’s demise in 1965.
Zuzick is not confident that the current owner, Bielinksi Homes, will get around to developing the property any time soon – both because of the firm’s internal problems and the deepening recession, which has hurt development and construction generally.
Village President Tony Lapcinski was a little more upbeat about the property, noting that the village’s plans for a sixth Tax Incremental Financing (TIF) district was moving ahead at an accelerated pace, and might be in place as early as 2010.
Creation of a new TIF district has not begun because the village has maxed out on its TIF districts, he explained. Districts four and five will be paid off during the coming year, however – “way ahead of schedule,” he noted – paving the way for the new district in 2010.
The new district’s boundardies would include the area around Highway 74/Waukesha Avenue and Main Street and extend westward along Main Street, “how far west we haven’t decided yet,” Lapcinski said.
The end of TIF districts four and five will also boost the village’s tax revenues. TIF district property taxes go only to pay off the loans on the infrastructure required to start the TIF districts in the first place. When the loans are paid off, property taxes then go to the village.
Bielinski has not made much progress in the meantime, beyond cleaning up the site, something the company only recently completed.
“All we’ve seen so far are some very preliminary plans,” Lapcinski said. “Without TIF six, they’re not going to be in any rush.”
Packard will start looking for work at another Hardee’s. In the meantime, she’ll miss the people she worked with and her customers.
“I just want to thank them for coming in and getting to know everyone by their first names,” she said. “Most of them just know me as Barb, too. I don’t think they even knew my last name, and I didn’t know theirs either.”