Two years after the closure of the Food Front Cooperative Grocery in 2023, its board and membership continue to wage war over the future of the Slabtown building.
In that time, owning members of the co-op—roughly 10,000 of them, though the total is up for debate—have argued over the future of the co-op and the building it owns at 2375 NW Thurman St. The co-op closed its doors after falling behind on vendor payments and being overshadowed by other grocery stores, declaring it could not stay afloat financially. The membership and the revolving door of board members have fought over a laundry list of issues: the accuracy and completeness of the co-op’s membership list, allegations of lack of transparency by the board, settling on a buyer for the building, and where the proceeds from the sale should go.
The latest chapter in the saga was a public membership meeting the Food Front board hosted July 1 at the Friendly House Community Center to discuss two sale options on the table: a purchase by Mark New, founder of N&N Real Estate Services, or Market of Choice, a local grocery chain with 12 stores in Oregon.
The board president, Roman Shvarts, revealed that a third option, a potential sale to K-5 Urban Holdings LLC, had been put to rest. “All three of us decided to pause with K5, and our lawyers approved this process so we can talk to other buyers,” Shvarts said.
The meeting devolved into acrimony almost as soon as it started.
The meeting room was humid and filled with roughly 40 members of the co-op. Members whispered among themselves in low tones before the meeting began. At the top, Shvarts, vice president Sanela Ruznic, and secretary and treasurer Kate Fulton stood at the front of the room.
Fulton opened the meeting with a prepared statement. She said the official sale of the Food Front property should reflect the interest of the membership as a whole. Fulton then went on to endorse the option of giving all of the proceeds of the sale to Friendly House.
Tensions rose once Fulton detailed the events of what she referred to as “the Thursday incident.” Fulton said that while discussing the options for selling the property on June 26, both Shvarts and Ruznic spoke to her in a vulgar manner.
Fulton went so far as to call the leadership of the board a “dictatorship.”
“This co-op belongs to the members, not the board of directors,” Fulton said. Some members applauded the statement. Fulton then went on to formally request that Shvarts and Ruznic resign from their positions as members of the board.
When Shvarts and Ruznic stepped forward to speak, they were met with yelling and heckling from the crowd. Some members raised their phones to record the two as they spoke.
One member in the back kept yelling, “Where’s the member list?” in reference to lack of clarity around who is actually on in the Food Front membership roll.
Shvarts summarized the two offers on the table. The one from Market of Choice comes to $1.5 million, a drop from the original $1.9 million offer that the grocery chain made in 2023. The other offer, of $2.2 million, came from a local property developer.
While Shvarts told the room that he was unwilling to reveal the identity of the developer, the investor himself, Mark New, rose fro his chair in the crowd.
New said he wanted to buy the property only if Market of Choice didn’t want it. Just that morning, the CEO and founder of Market of Choice, 62-year-old Rick Wright, had unexpectedly died at his home in Eugene.
“If his family wants it, I don’t,” New said. There was no pushback on New’s offer to leave the property to Wright’s family. The crowd applauded after he spoke.
The meeting lasted for about an hour and a half and the board said that it would schedule an official meeting next week where the membership would vote on a sale.
It’s unclear if such a vote will take place; some members have argued for years that the membership shouldn’t take a vote until the board can produce a complete and accurate list of members.
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