Joyce Angelo of Boardman unloads her cart after shopping Thursday morning at the new Meijer store in Austintown...by R. Michael Semple

AUSTINTOWN — Austintown residents have a new option for groceries and other goods.

After a considerable degree of ado and a delay or two, Meijer’s Austintown store opened at 6 a.m. Thursday.

The new 160,000-square-foot shopping center will compete with Walmart, which is right across the street.

The township zoning department originally approved the store plans in 2016. In February 2017, the Michigan-based grocery store chain bought 16.5 acres – where the former Austintown Middle School still stood – from the Austintown Board of Education for $2.6 million.

The 101-year-old school’s demolition began in July 2017, and construction was to begin two years later, with the store to open in 2021. Zoning Inspector Darren Crivelli, at the time, said he asked Meijer to try to push the project up to a 2020 opening.

Ultimately, it would take nine years, but Crivelli said he knew it was coming.

“I heard every reason under the sun why people thought Meijer wasn’t coming,” he said. People cited the closure of General Motors’ Lordstown plant, the loss of retail business in Austintown Plaza, the COVID-19 pandemic, too much traffic on Mahoning Avenue, the new stores in Boardman and Howland negating the need for an Austintown store and other reasons.

“I knew Meijer was going to happen when Chick-fil-a approached me at the beginning of COVID,” Crivelli said.

The intricacies are many, but Crivelli said Chick-fil-a, which celebrated its third anniversary in March, told the township it wanted to open in its current location because of the Meijer store, but originally said it would not begin work on that location until Meijer was opened. The fast-food chain’s opening also was dependent on approval of a red light at the entry, which would ultimately serve both businesses.

“Then, many months go by and one day I got drawings for Chick-fil-a, and I knew then that Meijer was coming,” he said.

Crivelli said when he began speaking with Meijer’s development team, its members said Austintown was slated to be the first location in its new region. The closest store was in Canton. But the Boardman and Howland locations, along with several others in its new region, went up first.

In the meantime, demolition of the old school caused frustration when it appeared to stop. Crivelli said the demolition took four to five months and had to be completed in two phases because excavators had to remove asbestos in the building between stages. He said they also ground much of the brick facade on site and used it as backfill.

“Then I got a call in 2023 from Woolford Engineering and they said Meijer would move forward in 2024 and 2025 based on the level of activity and business in the other stores in this region,” Crivelli said. “The stores were doing even better than they anticipated so they wanted to get the Austintown store up and running.”

Then the plan was for construction to begin in the summer of 2023 and the store to open last May, but that timetable changed too.

Crivelli said Meijer needed to get all of its site engineering and permit work done in 2023, which pushed the start date to April 2024 and the prospective opening to this month.

The traffic light at the entrance, across from Chick-fil-A, became operational in March, and the Meijer Express gas station and convenience store in front of the main building has been open since mid-April.

As of February, Meijer had 325 part-time and full-time positions available for its locations in Austintown, Medina and Richmond Heights. The Austintown store hired more than 100 workers.

With such a complicated backstory, it seems almost inevitable that the store’s opening would not be without incident.

Police reported three accidents on Mahoning Avenue since 6 a.m. on Thursday. One involved a car rear-ending a WRTA bus in front of the Meijer parking lot, leading to a few injuries and the car being towed.