50,000 Square Feet!

At the end of a contentious Stakeholders' meeting, in which Safeway once again disrespected the time, efforts, intelligence, and wishes of the Rockridge and Elmwood communities by neither responding to the Proposed Program put forth by the Stakeholder reps (see blog post, Oct. 1) nor offering any feedback on the suggestions submitted by the community at the last Stakeholders Meeting, Todd Paradis, Safeway's real estate manager finally gave some indication of Safeway's bottom line:

50,000 square feet, with rooftop parking, and loading docks in the neighbors' backyards.

In his words, taken from meeting notes:

"The idea of doing a 20-25k square foot store... that’s not an option for us, that’s not a concept that HQ wishes to advance at this time... We’d like to do a store around 50,000 square feet... Look at loading dock and driveway issue. I run into a problem with contiguous neighbors at that point. I am committed to come back to the next meeting that shows a size store – I won’t bring back 25k-35k square foot store – that project wouldn’t be viable – I don’t want to show you that. I think the magic number for me is about 50k square feet. ....In a scheme like that, the parking would be on top – I’m not saying there would not be a way to figure out how to do underground parking, that’s a lot of excavation. Store at ground level would end up with parking on the roof..... If we didn’t do a grandiose plan – we would do a paint and patch."

Interestingly enough, this corresponds to the site plan submitted to the public in June 2007.  Apparently, wiping the slate clean had nothing to do with gathering community feedback. 

Finally, it is interesting to note that what was presented at the meeting on Wednesday evening were six slides showing a public plaza option that would actually take over the sidewalk and part of the street, eliminating parking for local merchants.