El Camino Donuts pulls out from downtown Carson City location, cites building, code issues
Submitted by Kelsey Penrose on Thu, 06/24/2021 - 9:50am
Those who were awaiting a downtown gourmet donut shop will need to wait a little longer now that El Camino Donuts, slated to become Carson City's newest donut shop, has vacated the former Gather location they were planning on making their own.
Up until last week, signage for the shop was still up in the windows and there was activity going on inside. The co-owner of El Camino Donuts, Clint Goodrich, was planning for an early June opening.
However, signage has now been removed, all activity has stopped, and the El Camino Facebook page has been taken down.
According to co-owner Clint Goodrich, who recently relocated El Camino Donuts to Carson City from New Mexico, the reason resides in infrastructure issues at the location.
"We're having problems with the building," Goodrich said. "We were moving forward nicely up until we realized that the infrastructure in the space, and maybe the whole building, has infrastructure issues."
Goodrich stated he spoke with a couple of fire code professionals who would need to come in to test equipment before they could start, but they couldn't test any equipment due to the infrastructure issues not functioning properly.
When asked what the infrastructure issues were, Goodrich stated that the entire HVAC system is "more than half way unfunctional," and that it was impossible to heat or to cool the space. He also said that problems lay within fire code and fire suppression, and that the space had fallen out of code during its vacancy. Goodrich did not expand upon what codes he was citing.
"What happens sometimes with city codes is when someone leaves, its not that the usage (of the property) changes, its that the space sits empty for a year or more and things that were out of code, now need to come back into code," Goodrich said.
Goodrich said that discussions with the owner, who is listed at the Assessors office as "Eugene Chaney Family Limited Partnership" with a P.O. Box out of Strasburg, VA, had turned "contentious."
"These things should have been addressed after the previous tenants left, not on my dime," said Goodrich. "I'm not responsible for correcting their building code issues."
Goodrich stated that he removed all of the signage and equipment and is trying to figure out where to go from here.
"This is a curve on our end and I'm not sure what we're going to do," he said.
Goodrich said he is gathering up information on what needs to get done and what the general estimates are, and that he is also looking around for different spaces, but its difficult due to the fact that he would need to find a space that already housed a restaurant previously.
When asked if Goodrich had contacted the city regarding the code violations, he stated that the city doesn't decide who needs to bring the property into code, only that it needs to get done.
At this time, there are no other plans for the location, according to Carson City Community Development Director Hope Sullivan. Sullivan also stated that the Planning Department was not made aware of any issues with the property to her knowledge.
