Editorial: Go with the little guy

Wednesday, May 30, 2007 | 7:21 a.m.

I t's been almost three years since Vons closed down in West Las Vegas, leaving residents with an aggravating inconvenience - no nearby supermarket.

Hopes were lifted a couple of times that another large grocery chain might open a store in the community, but the years dragged by with no action, leaving many residents with just one viable option - Mario's West Side Market.

This 10,000-square-foot neighborhood store, operated by Mario Berlanga, met the challenge. While hope for another chain store rose and fell, and rose and fell some more, Mario's opened every day. For many residents the store is all that stands between inconvenience and major hardship.

Today hope is again on the rise. Two businesses are competing for the right to gain incentives offered by the city and state to build on a site at Martin Luther King and Lake Mead boulevards.

One of those competing is Food4Less, a chain whose warehouse-style stores advertise discount pricing. It is a subsidiary of The Kroger Co., one of the largest grocery chains in the country whose fiscal 2006 sales topped $66 billion. Teamed with a successful local developer, Laurich Properties, it is proposing to build a 70,000-square-foot store.

The other competitor is Mario Berlanga. He teamed with Agora, a California company with an impressive resume in developing commercial real estate.

If Food4Less had made its offer two years ago, the response would have been an automatic yes. It was just what people wanted, a known chain grocery store replacing the one that had left.

But the response is not automatic now. Berlanga's offer to build a 28,000-square-foot independent grocery store is attractive. At Berlanga's market, he has been known to offer credit and even free groceries to regular customers who need help. He is a longtime youth baseball coach who buys equipment out of his own pocket. He would bring a genuine sense of community to the store.

Given the omnipresence of supermarket chains, this is a situation where it would be nice to see the little guy, in this case , Berlanga, come out on top when the Las Vegas City Council makes its decision.