TOWN OF NIAGARA — A Porter Road travel plaza, built for $7 million just two years ago, has sold for almost $17 million.
It has also been renamed, a change that caught Niagara County economic development and town officials by surprise.
Town officials said Friday that they have still not seen the “closing documents” for the sale of what was the Quicklee’s Travel Plaza at 6021 Porter Road. The sale was first reported by the Buffalo Business First newspaper.
“We have no information on what’s happening there,” Niagara Town Supervisor Sylvia Virtuoso said. “We didn’t know anything about the sale.”
Records filed with the Niagara County Clerk indicate that PEMM Niagara LLC sold the Porter Road property to Niagara Falls Holdings NY LLC for $16.7 million. Niagara Falls Holdings is a limited liability corporation that appears to have been formed in Queens in 2019. No other information on the entity was immediately available.
PEMM LLC is an Avon-based corporation that is the parent company of Quicklee’s, which operates gas stations and convenience stores. Its locations are largely concentrated in Monroe County and in and around Rochester.
“Usually we’re introduced to a new business in the town and we discuss what we can do for them,” Virtuoso said. “But we haven’t heard anything from them. I think (the new owners) may believe that they’re operating in Niagara Falls.”
Virtuoso said town building inspectors noticed a change in the signage at the travel plaza, from Quicklee’s to TA Express. TA Express is a truck stop-branded gas and convenience store operator owned by TravelCenters of America. TravelCenters of America is a subsidiary of BP, a oil and gas company formerly known as British Petroleum.
The only other TA location in Western New York is just off the New York State Thruway exit at Pembroke.
Town building inspectors advised the new owners that they would need to file for permits to change the signage on the property. Virtuoso said the paperwork for those permits has now been received by the town.
The town supervisor said she was notified that a payment in lieu of taxes (PILOT) agreement between PEMM LLC and the Niagara County Industrial Development Agency has been “discontinued.”
The travel plaza project received $500,000 from Empire State Development (ESD) as part of its Regional Economic Development Council Initiative. It also received $725,000 in tax incentives from the Niagara County Industrial Development Agency (NCIDA).
Andrea Klyczek, executive director of the NCIDA, confirmed that the PILOT agreement for the property is no longer in effect. PILOT agreements typically allow developers to pay less than the full amounts of taxes due on a property for a specified period of time.
“All of the incentives associated with the project have been returned,” Klyczek said. “All the grant money has been returned. There are no further applications (for a PILOT on the property) at this time.”
Klyczek said the sale of the property showed that the IDA incentives worked.
“We got everything we wanted,” she said.
The original travel center project took four years to develop, at an estimated cost of $7 million. It is in close proximity to Amazon’s $550 million fulfillment center on Lockport Road.
The 3.1 million-square-foot five story facility, the size of six football fields and set to employ about 1,000 workers, is expected to be completed in time for Black Friday 2026. It will use robotic technology to receive, store, and ship items and has enough room for 414 tractor-trailer parking stalls, 55 loading docks, and 1,755 parking spaces.
The Porter Road travel plaza is the largest in the Niagara Region, covering 12,000 square feet, with a convenience store, 12 gas pumps, 10 truck pumps, four EV charging stations, a Tim Horton’s, a fireside lounge, CAT scales, showers for truckers, and a 3,000 square foot truck car wash. It employs 15 full-time workers.
Quicklee’s has also sold nearly a dozen convenience stores to Mirabito Holdings, including six in Monroe County and others across Western New York, according to Rochester Business Journal.