MPH Building on Midway bought "for the dirt"

The prominent former “MPH” auto shop on Midway Avenue has been sold to the investment firm that owns two contiguous vacant properties to the east. But the multi-million dollar hotel once planned for the block has no immediate future, according to the firm principal.

“We don’t have any plans for it at all,” Caleb McNamara of Blackfly LLC said in a phone call with The Star April 12. “It just added to our piece of the pie.”

McNamara’s Blackfly LLC owns the neighboring vacant building that once housed Pepper Jack’s Bar & Grille, and the building which until last month housed the Rural Resources STAR Hub, a resource navigation center which has moved to 404 Burdin Blvd. in Grand Coulee.

The MPH building at 123 Midway was listed for $120,000 on March 21, in “as is” condition. The recent sale does not yet show up on the Grant County property search website, but McNamara confirmed the sale when reached by phone.

McNamara said without the Banks Lake Pump Storage Project moving on the original schedule, the area couldn’t support the Wyndham-brand Microtel he and his former business partner had envisioned back in 2020.

The Banks Lake Pump Storage Project is a lingering Columbia Basin Hydropower project proposal that promoters estimated would bring 1,000 to 2,000 workers to the area to build a gravity-fed, pumped-storage system to drain water from Banks Lake back down to Lake Roosevelt, turning generators in the process to power a 500-to 1,000-megawatt power plant, and later pump the water back up to Banks Lake.

Columbia Basin Hydropower is owned by the three Columbia Basin Irrigation Districts, formed in 1939 in connection with the construction of Grand Coulee Dam.  

In 2020, a former project development manager with CBH had thought the project could break ground in 2022. Less than a year later, that was revised to late 2025 or early 2026. CBH currently estimates the project could come online in 2032. 

Whatever may happen in the future, the shop at 123 Midway is not suitable for occupancy or temporary event space but is rather a tear-down candidate, McNamara said.

“We have no direct plans at all,” McNamara said. “We just bought it for the dirt.”

The building last housed MPH Auto, a repair shop operated by the late Mike Horne.