The People Have Spoken; Is Safeway Listening?

Since 1997 the Burlingame community has been telling Safeway that it objects to its proposed Mega Store - as big as the BHS football field. Citizens also made clear that they do want a new Safeway that fits in with our small-town, pedestrian - friendly shopping district.

Last year the Planning Commission voted to reject Safeway’s proposed Mega Store by a resounding 6-1 and asked Safeway to come back with a different plan.

57.5% of the votes in the recent City Council election were cast for candidates strongly opposed to Safeway’s proposed Mega Store (only 42.5% for candidates that waffled on the issue).

The city Council in a 3-2 vote denied Safeway’s appeal.

Safeway then conducted a biased telephone survey and found only 52% of the populace want a new store and over 34% objected to the size and scale of the proposed store.

These are normally considered "landslide" election results.  Safeway has been told time and time again that we want a new Safeway.  One that fits into our town.

Yet Safeway persists in turning a deaf ear. Next Safeway began to work with the city council to reduce the time it takes to bring a denied project back to the planning commissioners.  The planning commissioners have a small amount of power to shape the designs that come before them.  Their most powerful tool is to deny a project with prejudice, which means that the applicant must wait one year before resubmitting the exact same, or similar plan to the planning commissioners. 

So what is Safeway’s game plan

• Safeway plans to let the present Safeway store continue to deteriorate. (It tried the same tactic in St. Helena, and it didn’t work)
• Safeway plans to continue to lock the public out of all the parking spaces in the former Wells Fargo Bank parking lot.
• Safeway plans to bring the same old tired plan back to the planning commission, or even better, straight to city council as soon as possible, and certainly before they lose any more votes on Council.

Granted that Safeway has the legal right to do these things with its property.

But is this the right way to move forward to resolve this important issue?

There is a better way, and that is to work with the community.

As one of the candidates said, " If Safeway had only listened to the community years ago, we would already have a new Safeway."

Present Safeway

Its all about footprint

It seems that Safeway is playing the numbers game again.  Several spokespeople have been raising the concern that it isn’t economic for them to build a store that is only ’17% larger’ than the current builkding space.  Here’s their logic:

The current square footage: 31,625 sq.ft (Safeway) 17,560 (Walgreens), 7,850 (Wells Fargo) total a 57,035 sq.ft. and the proposed square footage 45,728 (Safeway), 15,295 (Walgreens), 5,887 (retail) totals 66,910 sq. ft., only a 17% increase in store.

However according to "Supplement No. 1 to the Response to Comments Document on EIR", the numbers are

|Building Area|	Existing sq. ft |	Proposed Sq. ft |
Safeway	31,754	45,728
Wells Fargo	7,721	0
Walgreen	15,704	15,295
Retail	0	5,887
TOTAL	55,179	66,910

It seems Safeway is missing a very important point. It should be noted that this sq. footage contains an abandoned basement space beneath grade that is not currently used by Safeway. What is truly telling about the size of the store is the massive increase in footprint that the one structure will have over the existing three separate structures.

|Building Footprint |	Existing sq. ft |	Proposed Sq. ft |
Safeway	24,710	45,728
Wells Fargo	7,721	0
Walgreen	15,704	10,750
Retail	0	5,887
TOTAL	48,134	62,365

The FOOTPRINT measure is very important because ALL buildings will be contained in one big box. Presently there are three buildings, which breaks up the bulk and mass.

We can clearly see that the Safeway store alone will be more than 80% larger than the current Safeway.

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