Audio By Carbonatix
Back in February, City Hall proudly announced that Walmart was going to build, build, build all ’round town — “more than a dozen new projects in the city of Dallas,” said the release, with a Supercenter at R.L. Thornton and Ledbetter Drive at the very tippy-top of that list. And I see that project, all 180,000 square feet of retail, is about to take one giant step closer to becoming reality: The City Plan Commission’s meeting agenda for next week has just been posted, and there, close to the bottom, you’ll find Walmart’s application for a planned development district near that intersection on a lush piece of undeveloped property that abuts Five Mile Creek.
Which isn’t to say there aren’t some concerns from city staff, which wonders why Walmart didn’t choose to build across Ledbetter, where, I believe, there used to be a Sam’s. And there’s an issue with Walmart’s plans to rip out all those trees:
Ideally, the proposed development could
have been located on the north side of Ledbetter which is zoned RR Regional Retail
and is in need of re-development. The former big box retail site in Village Fair on the
north side of Ledbetter is approximately 771,000 square feet in area. The developable
portion of the request site is approximately 820,000 square feet in area. Staff is also
concerned with the amount of grading that will be necessary to develop the request site
and the number or trees which will have to be removed. The applicant is requesting
they only be required to mitigate 10 percent of the 6,468 caliper inches of protected
trees that will be removed. They are proposing a tree preservation area in lieu of
providing required mitigation, but the area they are proposing to preserve is already
protected as floodplain.While staff has the aforementioned concerns with the proposed development, staff
acknowledges the site could be developed today with a use that is permitted under the
existing zoning subject to all tree mitigation and code requirements. Therefore staff can
support the request subject to the applicant providing additional tree mitigation.
Read the whole thing here, beginning on Page 290. And, yes, there are several items of note on the CPC’s agenda — like, I see 7-Eleven on Lower Greenville’s going for its late-hours specific use permit, finally.
