The Planning Board offered the Walmart expansion proponents two choices last night at the public hearing for a 58,000 square-foot expansion of the Springfield Street facility.
The board members, several of whom had expressed reservation about the current plan, offered to close the hearing and vote on the special permit, site plan and stormwater management plan.
The second option was to allow the officials to reconsider and possibly amend that plan for the board’s next meeting on April 17. The project consultants chose the second option.
W/S Westfield Properties Limited Partnership of 1330 Boylston St., Chestnut Hill, Mass, the applicant, is requesting the Planning Board to approve a special permit, the site plan and stormwater management plan for a 58,692-square-foot addition to the Walmart store at 141 Springfield Road.
The applicant is seeking approval to expand the existing 127,284 store into a 186,064-square-foot Walmart superstore. The present building is located on 91.6 acres of land zoned for Business B use.
The board members identified four areas of concern at the March 20 session and asked that the plan be revised to address those issues, which included creation of a new 30-vehicle parking lot on the northwest face of the building, landscaping, maintenance and litter control, and an outdoor display and storage area.
The project developers resolved three of those issues to the satisfaction of the board members.
The changes included eliminating the construction of the 30-space parking lot of the west access road used by delivery trucks. That area is now a lawn with a number of trees and the lot would have substantially reduced the green space.
The proponents also plan to increase the size of several traffic islands to better support landscaping, and to add 200 more trees and more than 300 shrubs to the site plan.
The maintenance and litter control are required under the orders of conditions approved by the Conservation Commission, but City Advancement Officer Jeff Daley requested the Planning Board to adopt strong language in its conditions to control litter.
Daley said that section of Route 20 from West Springfield is the major gateway to the city and the litter generated by Walmart patrons creates an eyesore, making that area the worst in the city for litter. Daley said that litter also chokes the banks of the Westfield River.
Board Chairman Philip McEwan suggested that a better option for the city to control litter would be enforcement through the Health Department. Health inspectors have the authority to issue daily fines of $100, while the Planning Board’s special permit enforcement is a much more cumbersome, and less effective, process.
The only major issue not resolved last night is the outdoor storage area, associated with the store’s garden center, located in the parking lot in front of the garden center.
Matthew D. Smith, an engineer with Bohler Engineering of Southborough, Mass., and Attorney Michael J. Frankel, a principal of Frankel Devlin LLC, in Springfield, argued that the outdoor sales and display area is allowed under the city’s zoning ordinances as an accessory use of site and is incidental to the store retail operations.
McEwan and William Onyski both argued that the 20,000 square foot outdoor display area is not an accessory use to a 5,000 square foot garden center.
“Where in the regulations does it say you can have an outdoor sales area?” Onyski asked the developers.
McEwan said the city’s code of ordinances “state what you can do, not what you can’t do.
“What you’re talking about is an accessory use incidental to the permitted use,” he said. “I see an incidental.
“I don’t see where we have an ordinance that allows parking spaces to be used use as something small, like a carriage coral, but not outdoor sales,” McEwan said. “I don’t see where the city ordinance allows parking spaces to be sued for something else. I have a hard time (accepting) that this is incidental when I can’t find it at any other Walmart.”
McEwan said the 5,000-square-foot garden center was added after the Planning Board approved the original special permit in 1993.
“You have a massive building, but you stack merchandise eight-feet high (in the parking lot). It looks terrible. We’re here to come up with a quality plan. This is the worst Walmart in New England,” McEwan said.
“I’m looking at our ordinances, that this incidental use is accessory to the garden center, it’s outrageous,” he said.
Onyski also asked if the box trailers used for storage on the west side of the store would be removed.
“You’ve had as many as 17 trailers. It seems to me that a larger store would need more storage containers,” Onyski said. “You’re not supposed to have storage containers. You’re not supposed to have bundles of cardboard stored outside the building. You’ve had plenty of opportunity to get rid of those trailers, but they are still there.
“I would suggest that if you want a favorable vote, you show you are serious and remove those trailers.”
The plans call for addition of a loading dock on the west face of the building. That loading area would protrude and provide access to two trucks on the north side of the dock and two on the south side. The trucks would back into the loading area parallel to the building.
The board members suggested several options to resolve the outdoor storage area issue, including limiting the display area in front of the garden center and storing the materials at the south end of the expanded building, with an employee to assist patrons in loading those items into the patron’s vehicle. The store could include a small sales area at the relocated outdoor storage area.
Another option is to install a permanent fence around the current outdoor storage area, eliminating it as a parking area.
McEwan requested a motion from the board members to either close the hearing and proceed with a vote or to continue the hearing.
The Walmart proponents requested the extension to allow consultation with the store chain officials.
The board voted to continue the hearing to its April 17 session.
