Albany, OR. Speculations of Wal-Mart at Shopping Center

Will Albany shopping center have a Wal-Mart? [Albany Democrat-Herald]

Albany planning officials are getting ready to handle a site plan application for a major shopping center east of Interstate 5.

There is speculation that the center will be anchored by a Wal-Mart store because SmartCentres, the Canadian firm proposing the development, has worked mostly with that company.

Wal-Mart tops the list of U.S.-based companies SmartCentres names on its website as its tenant partners.

SmartCentres had a pre-application meeting last Wednesday with city planners about its plans for 25 acres on the southwest corner of Santiam Highway and Goldfish Farm Road.

Part of the site was known as the Ropp property when the city council rezoned it from residential to regional commercial use in 2006.

SmartCentres now owns the site, which includes the 12-acre Ropp property as well as land previously owned by Coastal Farm, which has a store nearby.

The preliminary plans include one 190,000-square-foot anchor store as well as four smaller stores, according to Don Donovan of the city planning department.

Donovan said the anchor store is unnamed on the paperwork, and city planners didn’t ask which company would occupy it.

A representative of SmartCentres could not be reached for anything definitive.

Donovan expects the site plan to be submitted for approval within three months.

The planning department will ask the city council Wednesday to authorize a time-saving way of handling the application if it’s appealed.

Under the request, Donovan explained, the request would be subject to a neighborhood meeting and then approval by the planning staff.

Then, if there’s an appeal, it would go straight to the city council instead of the planning commission first.

“Due to the 120-day deadline for processing local land use applications, it would be difficult to process the anticipated appeal of any staff decision through both the planning commission and city council,” community development Director Helen Burns Sharp wrote in a memo to the council. “The requested action ensures that the city council can weigh in on this important development review without the time pressures which would otherwise be imposed.”

When rezoning the property, the council imposed a traffic cap of 800 trips during the the peak hour of the day.

Posted by Alex Goldschmidt on Tuesday, September 11, 2007

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