BROOKINGS (10-29-26) — At this week’s meeting, the Brookings City Council voted to sell city-owned land for the development of a Menards store in Brookings. The sale involved about 30 acres of land that will bring in roughly $5.3 million for the City of Brookings.
City Manager Paul Briseno says the city won’t touch that money for awhile… “What happens is that money gets parked into a reserve — and so in case we have to buy that land back, that money is relatively available. So that’s going to be about a year or two year process to ensure all the things happen which they agreed to happen.”
He said once the store has been built, the City Council will decide on how to put these one-time dollars towards future community development projects… “Ultimately, how the Council used it in the past is an economic development opportunity. So things like the interchange — when there’s a $2 million need from the City to help participate in that with the County and other community partners with a $24 million project — the Council was able to step up, and that was because of prior Councils that put that in place”
Briseno said in the past, the City Council has used these sorts of funds for all sorts of things… “And so the current Council’s using some of those dollars still today for things like the downtown investment. They have a grant program where they’ve spent about $400 thousand the last two years, and I think it’s about $1.5 to $1.8 million that they’ve seen reinvested in the community by private owners. And so that type of opportunity to reinvested in the community and to neighborhoods is what Council has done with that economic development fund in the past. And so this work, this action isn’t about this Council — it’s really about future Councils and what they want to do to continue to invest in the community.”
Menards hopes to open a store in Brookings, just north of Target, sometime in 2029.
— Brookings Radio News
