Beside the Point: Their Northcross to Bear

The lunchtime deluge of citizens communications brings many things at City Council – not all of them good. It's parsimonious charity to say that Jennifer Gale's semiregular dislocutions there are among the most well-reasoned and coherent. It was all the more surprising then, last week, that the noontime hour brought such an illuminating, eye-opening discussion.

Speakers from Responsible Growth for Northcross had signed in to speak to council. The ad hoc organization, composed of neighborhood association members surrounding Northcross Mall, formed to combat the Wal-Mart proposed at the ailing engine of commerce. It was their pleas to slow the process – one they maintain they were wrongly excluded from – that led to council's first major public discussion of the proposal. Speaking to their concerns, Council Member Jennifer Kim inquired as to the law surrounding their notification. Assistant Watershed Protection director Tammy Williamson said the plans first arrived in her office as an administrative site plan, meaning, due to its commercial nature ostensibly squaring with the mall's current use, "There was no public hearing associated with it." City Manager Toby Futrell further clarified that if a new site plan stays within the previous zoning category – if there's "no zoning change, no variance, and your site plan is code compliant" – the lesser notification is OK. Yet the expedited approval process didn't preclude any form of notice; Williamson said, "We normally catch everyone," but allowed that sometimes neighborhood associations "fall off of our list." No matter, she clarified, it would have been "a relatively generic notice" anyway.

During the discussion, Council Member Mike Martinez established that staff supposedly had no clue who the tenant would be until it was unveiled in the Austin American-Statesman. But when it came to Wal-Mart's secrecy, Council Member Brewster McCracken wasn't buying it. Having examined the site plan for the first time that morning, he said that its mammoth breadth "reflects a freestanding discount super store," before rattling off the tell-tale stats: The center alone would create 10,686 car trips as part of its "24-hour, two-way traffic volume ... [more traffic] than the entire amount of Northcross Mall currently." It also would create a footprint of 217,000-plus square feet, which, McCracken repeatedly declared, "makes it the largest retail establishment in central Texas outside of Cabela's and IKEA." (Actually, it's bigger than Cabela's, second only to IKEA's 252,000 square feet in Round Rock. The entire retail square footage of the Northcross redevelopment – of which Wal-Mart is only the anchor – is planned to exceed 400,000.) "We have a problem with our current code if this kind of massive expansion is going to happen on a neighborhood street, not a highway," said McCracken. "The notice to the neighbors needs to let them know that something more than a site plan has been filed. It needs to be something like, 'All hell is about to break loose, so let's get ready.'"

Kim asked about expanded notification for small-business owners in the area, moving the discussion toward the tools available to rein in Wal-Mart's worst intentions. McCracken inquired as how to keep the store from operating 24 hours around the clock – possibly via noise or light pollution constraints or its incompatibility with commercial design standards – but only a conditional zoning overlay could prevent it. "It's amazing to me that our zoning code is the only way we have the ability to say you can't be open at 3 o'clock [in the morning]," McCracken said.

Returning to commercial design standards, McCracken's own pet project, he lamented that "we were looking at this area as being a great opportunity for mixed urban use, [and] infill redevelopment," but the project narrowly skirted the standards' implementation date. "This apparently got approved between first and second reading [of the design standards ordinance], so it was deep, deep into the process when this started," McCracken noted. It wouldn't be the only serendipitous instance of suspect timing for Wal-Mart and developers Lincoln Properties either; a timeline issued by Supercenter opponents Liveable City outlines the city's months-long delay in initiating work on the upcoming big-box ordinance, raising troubling questions as to whether the delay was orchestrated to allow Wal-Mart to slide in under the radar. The coincidences have not gone unnoticed – going one better than the application chronology Futrell promised council members, Kim has called on city auditor Stephen Morgan to investigate the entire application process, and the impact on the surrounding area. (For more on the controversy swirling around the applications process, see p.30.)

But for now it'll have to wait. This week's council meeting contains another exceptionally light agenda, the sticky centerpiece being zoning approval of the St. David's expansion, reappearing from last week. Council has another week to mull all things Mart until the big-box ordinance comes before them, Dec. 14. On that, and with their own problem, neighbors are hoping they'll think outside the box.

"Point Austin" will return next week.