QuikTrip coming soon?

The Lincoln Parish Police Jury and the QuikTrip Corporation took another step Tuesday toward the long-promised gas station and convenience store becoming a reality alongside Interstate 20 in Ruston.

It’s been more than two years since the jury first sold a portion of the Lincoln Parish Library’s parking lot to QuikTrip for the company to add to the adjacent lot it had already acquired, where the former Pow-Wow used to sit.

Since then QuikTrip has also acquired the nearby lot on Trenton Street where the oil change business once stood.

Now the jury has agreed to QuikTrip’s proposal to swap that oil change property in exchange for another slice of the library’s northeast parking.

“They’re asking for us to swap (the oil change location) with a little more land at the front of the library parking lot,” Parish Administrator Doug Postel told jurors during their public works committee meeting.

He said QuikTrip believes the exchange would create a better footprint for their gas station build.

“The company looked at the site and didn’t really care for the way the store was going to sit on it,” Postel said.

The swap will be a net gain of about 17 parking spaces for the library. QuikTrip will grade down the old oil change site and make it look like the rest of the parking lot before handing it over to the library.

With the new footprint for the QuikTrip, Postel said Pine Street — the road that doglegs through the library parking lot, connecting Trenton Street and Vienna Street — will no longer be a street. It’ll instead be a public easement, featuring the same Trenton Street entrance, but motorists will now enter the QuikTrip parking lot in order to use the exit onto Vienna Street.

QuikTrip began talks with the library board and police jury on the property in 2019, before the Tulsa, Oklahoma-based company had any complete sites in Louisiana. Now it has locations in Shreveport and Bossier City.

The jury agreed to the original property sale in February of 2020.