PG&E, Kmart make separate $6 million Mendo land deals – come along as I follow the money!

Kmart just sold the Ukiah Home Depot store-lease property to a publicly traded Michigan real estate firm for $6.3 million.
Say what? Kmart?
A remaining morsel of Kmart, called, Msci 2007 1 Q16 Ca Kmart Properties LLC, sold the old Kmart lease, now attached to the property housing Home Depot, to Agree Realty of the Detroit, Michigan area for more than 6 million dollar bills.The Ukiah Kmart Store, which opened in 1977 in what is now Albertsons, moved to 350 N. Orchard Ave with much fanfare and was closed in 2003 along with 325 other K-Mart stores nationwide. Sam Walton’s Walmart and other more marketing/price predatory chains put Kmart out of business. Kmart was created 20 years before Sam Walton was born. Kmart dates from 1899, as the Kresge stores.
The paperwork for this sale was screwy, which always makes me curious when I am following the money. The paperwork says the sale is only for the lease but includes a documentary transfer tax, which provides the fact that $6.3 million changed hands. A documentary transfer tax is only for the sale of real property, not a lease. All these years, Home Depot’s property and lease have apparently been owned by Kmart?. There is nothing to indicate that anything might change on the ground, but I can only wonder if Agree Reality bought a whole bunch of these at once. How important is this firm and others like it to chain store development and store selection locally and elsewhere? The deal was signed by Danielle Spehar, general counsel of Agree Realty, identified as AR Land in the documents.
This is the first in what will be a series of dives into the unseen areas of our county. I will leave the well-trod highways to others. As we go, I hope people will send me more tidbits that we don’t already know. I will ask for editorials from writers of all viewpoints. There is some fairly dark stuff going on right now from the City of Fort Bragg to the national scene and all this squabbling, power games and propaganda is being hashed and rehashed, then written about everywhere. The facts will get more fascinating as we go, especially if you read and suggest others do so also. I’d rather have your readership hits than your money.
Agree is highly rated as a publicly traded company. They deal with all the chains. Home Depot and Lowe’s at the same time. I had never heard of them until I found this. I did contact them but don’t expect a response. If they do call me, I’ll follow up. The company’s website and Securities and Exchange Commission documents are now designed as sales pitches for investors. A document like an 8k (quarterly report) and 10k (annual report) used to be full of truthful, mandated info never, ever found in a press release. Before it was turned into PR, a reporter could use this data to see a truer picture of a company that a community might depend on. Now the 8k filed in January is composed of a press release and a PowerPoint designed for investors. As an investor, I liked the old real way where I could figure out what was going on with a company. However in 2025 it seems, sales pitches are preferred to facts, it’s all part of the reality-twisting world we live in now, informed only by propaganda.
My mom, a fellow Walmart hater, once did a price comparison between Walmart and Kmart and found no difference comparing 12 common items. We never liked the sucker factor when it came to stampeding human sheep and marketing fibs nearly everyone believed/believes.
I tried to do this comparison with Grocery Outlet/Safeway/Harvest. Although I found prices were lower more often at GO but also NOT. They are lower on some of the 20 items I picked at Safeway and Harvest. It is hard to do comparative shopping over time with Grocery Outlet as they have different stuff every time you go. They buy nearly expired and rejected foods and sell them super cheap. I admit that part is fun, but when the manager has to buy something with local demand, like North Coast Brews that the Ukiah store has, they aren’t cheaper. It’s hard to see how Grocery Outlet can succeed in Fort Bragg with the mileage premium and Highway 20 and the rest of the windy roads. Nobody is coming from Willits or Boonville to shop, it’s just the local audience. Let’s try to understand politics and the future through following the money, not the propaganda!
AIl-generated and press release news never challenges power. The vast majority of news outlets follow the same stories. I promise you many unique local stories, as I am back to digging through documents and talking to people. Please help us build readership by subscribing to mendocinocoast.news. As a young reporter, I learned to mine documents which led to stories that made me locally and regionally known and in the community of the Department of Interior, nationwide. It vaulted me into covering the water wars, which Trump has apparently just ended by giving all the water needed by fish, the environment and northern California farmers to So Cal developers. I have steadily watched documents and come up with great stories. When I was at the Advocate News this work led to an incredible series of stories of fraud and probable organized crime that put the Heritage House out of business. THIS DOES NOT INVOLVE THE current owner, although he was a good story for me too. He would not reveal his identity but I found Jeff Greene in some Point Arena water receipts and outed him as owner. He has been open and public ever since and I have no idea why he wanted to be anonymous. Again, I can say he was not connected to those far more colorful previous owners. In my views over the years, I have watched patterns. Right now more county code enforcement cases than I have ever seen before are being filed. Wow. It could be a different methodology but from my perch as documents lurker it’s there. Also far fewer foreclosures in this booming economy.
Another interesting tidbit I just found was $6.3 million spent by PGE for a piece of land in Willits across from the hospital there. They bought it from Archway Properties, a developer in Willits that also seems to have made a nifty investment and sale. The sale in the vicinity of two other big PG&E facilities. I never knew the scale of those PG&E yards. When they come to Fort Bragg the Skunk Train rents land to PGE to stage on the old mill site as they don’t have massive rambling insurance yards here. The new property has been nicely mowed and is inside a much more secure and nicer fence than the rest of the ramshackle junky places around. Not sure if that is new or if the old tenant put that up to sell it. Why do you care? I wonder why the PG&E monopoly doesn’t buy land on the Coast where they spend half the winter fixing power outages. And what are all those yards for in Willits? While the Michigan boys are under no obligation to tell me anything about the odd Kmart lease, PGE is a monopoly that has a tremendous impact on my life. The existing properties, both near the hospital, are only partly used. I could find nothing in searching 100 years of newspapers about all that development in Willits by PGE. When did they come in? What exactly does “electric distribution operations contract execution center” mean? That’s where the new land is being added on. Baechtel Creek was once terribly polluted by heavy metals, not from PGE but from a Remco factory that spewed Chromium, then went out of business in 1995. Many utility yards have histories of noxious pollution (Erin Brockovich and PGE) but there is no record of this here. After WWII, materials were used that were soon in transformers and such that were discovered to be indestructible and stay and built up to the point they cause serious health problems in all animals, including us.
What is the history and future out there? Does anyone care? If you do care, I’d be happy to help you do an investigation of the creek and its history and publish it here. The money trail leads to amazing places and when I get a hunch from years of following the money it is usually a better story than what we get from the press releases. Bruce Burton, manager of Archway, signed the sale papers to PGE.
Both deals, for roughly the same amount of money, were filed with the county in December 2024 or January 2025.
I’m glad a lot of outfits have six million lying around! I am mystified by how everyone thinks nothing will change and routinely makes these large investments without a thought to the chaos I see all around. That’s why I like following the money. While I may preach Trump is going to end the world, the documents tell a different story. Noiw, if the rich guys all start selling out and moving their businesses to Peru, the money will be the first to tell us something is really wrong.. Coming soon – some good new court cases and more following the money to places you may have never imagined.
If you want to know stuff you didn’t know, subscribe to the MCN discussion list and our email list here at Mendocinocoast.news Email me at frankhartzell@gmail.com . I want to have others be regular writers, although no libel or slander will be allowed and all facts will be checked, just like the news always was before Weeinie Mark Z came along with his “no responsibility for anything” mantra.