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Panel OKs Holiday Wal-Mart

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By Carl  Orth | The Suncoast News

Published: November 9, 2007

HOLIDAY, Fla. - HOLIDAY, Fla. - Even though a proposed Wal-Mart store at S.R. 54 and Grand Boulevard got the go-ahead from county officials Thursday, residents vow to appeal the decision to the County Commission.

The county's Development Review Committee approved variances for a traffic signal and a driveway for the retail complex. Those issues derailed Wal-Mart's plans in June, when county commissioners rejected those plans and sent them back to the DRC for a second look.

With variances in hand, the DRC then approved the preliminary site plan for the Supercenter store of nearly 190,000 square feet, plus a garden center of slightly more than 15,000 square feet, on the southwest corner of the intersection.

One area resident, Cynthia Besio argued before the DRC a smaller store could solve most of the traffic flow problems she foresees. She suggested Wal-Mart build a store of about 110,000 square, which would be nearly half the Supercenter footprint.

"Be a neighborhood store, not a big beast," Besio urged Wal-Mart at Thursday's DRC meeting.

Schuyler Ellis of St. Petersburg argued the Supercenter plan overloads the parcel of about 26 acres. Ellis is a member of the activist group Wal-Mart Alliance for Reform Now, or WARN.

Glenn Smith, a Fort Lauderdale-based attorney for Wal-Mart Stores East LP, convinced DRC members the larger store would work with the variances.

Wal-Mart has received permission to put a traffic signal on Grand Boulevard, at the southern entrance to the store parking lot.

Ellis criticized the traffic light as essentially placing the main entrance at the rear of the store, forcing drivers to double back toward the front parking lot.

The Wal-Mart traffic-flow plan would tend to encourage drivers to use Colonial Hills and other subdivision streets as shortcuts, Besio and others say.

Plans were approved, too, for a left-turn lane in the median of westbound S.R. 54 into an entrance to the store on the northwest corner of the property. The driveway entrance had to be shifted slightly to the east to fit onto the Wal-Mart lot than county rules ordinarily allow.

Wal-Mart, however, omitted any deceleration lane for eastbound drivers on S.R. 54 making right turns into the store's northwest entrance. Right turns will be made directly from the southernmost lane of S.R. 54.

"This seems to be the weak link in this," one DRC member, Dan Johnson, an assistant county administrator, said. The Wal-Mart store at Little Road and S.R. 54 has deceleration lanes for right turns, he noted.

The county placed a condition that state traffic regulators have to go along with the plan for the S.R. 54 left-turn lane and driveway.

The preliminary site plan for the store got DRC approval. The actual construction plan will have to go before county commissioners for the final OK.

Several people spoke in favor of the Wal-Mart project, including Bill Bunting, a resident of Beacon Woods, in Hudson. Wal-Mart has followed a "good-neighbor policy" toward Beacon Woods to reshape its store now under construction on U.S. 19 north of S.R. 52, at the western entrance to the subdivision, he said.

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