Save Our Community was founded in the movement to resist Wal-Mart's development in Rosemead, California. Now, it has become a general site for news, information, gossip, talk, and blogging about Rosemead. We also have stories about South San Gabriel, San Gabriel, Montebello, and occasionally about Pico Rivera, El Monte, South El Monte, Alhambra, Temple City, and other nearby communities. Your host is Todd. If you want a blog just sign up, get approved, and start writing. Good posts will be moved onto the home page.
Wal-Mart Outpads
FYI: It's a bank and a restaurant, out along Walnut Grove. I'm not sure if notices were sent for residences within 300 feet of the entire project area, or just the small parcels adjacent to Walnut Grove. If the latter, then not many people would have lived in the notice area.
Project Approved
The Planning Commission approved the project unanimously. It's relatively small and quite distant from the residential areas.
Our main focus was simply trying to correct some of the shortcomings in the implementation we've seen on the rest of the Rosemead Commercial Retail Center. I wanted to make sure the new lights were actually "cut-off" fixtures, with the light focused downward and without the side glare of the current lights on the site. I also wanted to make sure there was sufficient greenery between the new construction and the existing building that there would be something to help reduce the possible problem of noise reflecting off the new buildings and back to the residences on Delta or up on Walnut Grove. We also wanted to make sure the sound of roof-mounted air conditioning units did not adversely affect residences.
In sum, we were concerned with the things that any reasonable person would be concerned about. The only sort of person who could say we were not being fair, or that these concerns about the welfare of the residential neighbors are invalid, would be someone who is overly indebted to a developer.
More details
It's actually one building with several restaurants/retail, and a bank. One building will be 3,000 square foot building for a Wells Fargo. The other building will contain all of the following: 3,000 square feet for a Panda Express/Hibachi San, with drive-thru; 2,900 square feet for another fast food restaurant, without drive-thru; 1,200 square feet designated for a 'speciality retailer.' I don't know if tenants for the second restaurant and speciality retailer have been identified.
This leads to an increase of 4,652 square feet over the total retail footage covered in the previous Rosemead Commercial Retail EIR. It will bring the total retail square footage at this location to 240,467 square feet. To put this in context, this is several times larger than the retail square footage of all of the mixed-use projects approved by the Planning Commission during the previous nine months (if I had to guess, I'd say it's 4-5X greater, but I haven't totaled up the area for the other projects). On the other hand, it's only about a 2% increase in total square footage over the previously-completed EIR.