Why are most Eugene food-cart pods in the city center? Who’s looking out for the hard-working stiffs in the city’s northwest industrial corridor who need a quick bite at lunchtime?
A Eugene real estate investor figures to rectify the injustice by creating a food-cart pod in the thick of that dusty blue-collar zone.
Jeffrey Laramee is exploring creating a pod of three carts, a coffee kiosk, outdoor seating and parking spaces on a three-quarter-acre industrial-zoned parcel his company bought in 2022.
The land, at Enid and Prairie roads, is about a third of a mile east of the big Sierra-Pacific — formerly Seneca Jones — lumber mill and wood-burning power plant on Highway 99.
Laramee’s land is in the city’s urban growth area, but outside the city limits, and he’s inquired with the city about annexing the land into limits. The city’s zoning code permits food carts on industrial land.
“We plan to clean up the property, clear some trees, add gravel,” he wrote to the city. “Eventually, we intend to lease ground space to food trucks that will serve the many employees in the surrounding area.”
Laramee tells Eugene Weekly he doesn’t have a timeline. “We’re still in the very early phases of this,” he says. He’s not sure what kinds of food trucks he’ll seek, other than that they will offer “typical fare.”
Over the decades, a string of investors have bought and sold the parcel at the southwest corner of Enid and Prairie, but no one’s done anything with it, property records show. Laramee’s company paid $366,000 for the land, according to the deed.
That’s ‘dishmachines’ to you
In unrelated news, Auto-Chlor, a national company in the niche business of making and servicing commercial dishwashers, plans to build a roughly 26,000-square-foot service center in Springfield.
Never heard of the company? No surprise. It works in the obscure, specialized field of making, leasing and servicing high-tech low-energy-use commercial dishwashers — Auto-Chlor calls them “dishmachines” — to restaurants and brewpubs, as well as providing other cleaning services to hotels and hospitals.
Based in California, Auto-Chlor has five Oregon service centers, including a small existing one in west Springfield for the Lane County-area market.
In filings with the city, the company said its new tilt-up concrete building would go on two acres at 35th Street and Kathryn Avenue. That’s in east Springfield, less than a mile east of the Jerry’s Home Improvement center.
An arm of Auto-Chlor bought the vacant parcel in 2023 for $800,000, the deed shows.
The company, which is privately owned by several families, did not respond to inquiries from Eugene Weekly. The company’s timeline for the Springfield project is unclear.
Auto-Chlor’s website says the company has about 140 service centers nationwide.
The company specializes in leasing machines to customers and sending service crews out to clean and adjust the machinery every month.
The commercial dishwasher field, in which companies either sell or lease out their machines, is competitive. Auto-Chlor is not among the giants, but it is strong in leasing low-energy-use equipment, according to companies that analyze the market. The company’s current Springfield location is in a building it shares with a martial arts studio on Shelly Street at the western edge of the city.
Bricks $ Mortar is a column anchored by Christian Wihtol, who worked as an editor and writer at The Register-Guard in Eugene 1990-2018, much of the time focused on real estate, economic development and business. Reach him at Christian@EugeneWeekly.com.