After years of delays in court, a long-planned expansion and renovation project at the Edgartown Stop & Shop is back on track, spokesmen for the grocery chain confirmed Thursday.
“We can confirm that we plan to move forward with the expansion of our Edgartown store location and hope to begin construction later this year,” communications spokesman Jennifer Brogan told the Gazette in an email.
Geoghan Coogan, a Vineyard Haven attorney who has served as local counsel for Stop & Shop, concurred. A building permit application has been filed, according to Mr. Coogan, pending signoff from the Martha’s Vineyard Commission land use planning committee on a construction management plan.
“I believe they expect to start some site work before the summer, but most likely looking at the fall to begin construction,” Mr. Coogan said in an email.
The major expansion and renovation project will overhaul the busy Upper Main street store by adding 16,000 square feet of space to the existing 25,000-square-foot grocery store. Relocation of a drive-through bank on the property, additional parking spaces and a complete redesign of the store’s parking lot are also planned, among other things.
The last major expansion of the store was in 1989.
On the drawing board for years, the project was approved by the MVC in 2018 and subsequently approved at the local level by the Edgartown planning board.
But plans were stalled when Edgartown attorney Benjamin Hall Jr., whose family owns property abutting the store, began filing a series of appeals in the Massachusetts Land Court. Mr. Hall alleged a variety of technical and substantive problems in the way the permit process was handled.
The appeals took numerous twists and turns, with hearings, claims, counter claims and a mountain of pleadings. In the end Stop & Shop prevailed on every count.
This past July a state appeals court judge upheld an earlier dismissal of claims in the land court, extinguishing all further avenues of appeal for Mr. Hall.
Meanwhile, in an unrelated civil action this week, a personal injury lawsuit was filed against Stop & Shop in Dukes County superior court by a California resident who claimed she was injured after tripping and falling on the “poorly lit and poorly placed concrete parking barrier” in the parking lot of the Edgartown store.
Represented by attorneys at Morgan & Morgan in Boston, Vicki Eklund, a resident of Marin County, is seeking a jury trial and unspecified damages for alleged negligence and carelessness, according to the complaint.
The alleged incident occurred in October 2020.
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