Wal-Mart Annual Review

Last night the Rosemead Planning Commission held its annual review of Wal-Mart. It snuck up on me; since the store opened in late September, I assumed the review would be in late September instead of mid-August.

You may also have noticed that Wal-Mart is in the process of building a brick wall around the transformer. This is part of their odd fixation with blaming their continuing noise violations on the transformer. The reality of their last sound study is that the noise violation is a result of the accumulation of the transformer, the store's electric distribution system, the store's roof-mounted HVAC equipment, and the reverberation of noise against the flat face of their rear wall.

To address the noise issue, they should be addressing all of these sources, since their EIR claimed there would be no significant noise impact from the store. Instead, they keep taking the entire period between each annual review before responding with either a noise study or a "response" plan, and they keep trying to say it's the transformer's fault, even though their own sound study says otherwise.

Something that people should be asking is, "Why does it take Wal-Mart nine months to start building a small sound wall for their transformer, when it only took them about nine months to get their property transformed from a hole in the ground to a fully-operational supercenter?"