The following is an edited version of a recent letter to the City Council:
The thoughts and requests stated here come from my passionate belief that Westbrook is heading in a very wrong direction as to development of the “Westbrook Arterial/Gateway” area, and my fear that if the Council does not take action to at the very least review the situation, we will soon pass a point of no return, to our great detriment.
My sincere hope is that you will examine all of the information, research, and public comment presented, as well as think about your own observations in Westbrook and elsewhere, and vote confidently to enact standards which will prevent “big box” development. I am not asking that you discourage one particular company; that company just happens to have applied to build something gargantuan here, and arrives replete with many other issues which are difficult to separate from the local ones at hand. But this is not about one company; it is about good land use, wise zoning, and protecting and enhancing our community now and for the future.
On almost a daily basis I look at this area and I imagine it soon looking like Maine Mall Road, or Payne Road, or similar “regional retail” places. And it is my understanding that this type of development is Westbrook’s “plan” for this area; that this is what we want. Is this what we want? If so, why do we want this? We owe it to ourselves and to the future of Westbrook to examine these questions and arrive at articulate answers. If perhaps we don’t want this, if it is not inevitable, then the Council must change this course, or at least review it, now. Your window of opportunity is fast closing. Once the council enacts site plan standards, the development of this area will be out of your hands, and the Planning Board must follow the regulations as written. There is no going back. If we are following this “regional retail” course only because it was charted some many years ago, don’t you have concerns about that?
I implore each of you to ask yourself why we want to take a Gateway area that is largely pristine and certainly otherwise marketable and redevelopable, and install pavement on nearly its entirety, “big boxes” and regional traffic? This is not going to benefit Westbrook. It will irreparably harm Westbrook. Please exercise your long-term vision and your creativity and not be unduly influenced by the lure of quick and easy, short-term money. Municipalities have always had financial woes, and always will. Big box retail is not the cash cow savior that it tells us it is. There is no sales tax benefit to the local community; the tax revenue is largely if not entirely offset by what this kind of development will cost us in public safety services, infrastructure, and lost revenues and employment at existing businesses; and it will without any doubt saddle the neighboring residential and school areas with permanent, horrible traffic.
Please do not be persuaded that if you limit “big box” development for all of these sound reasons, that somehow that makes you “anti-business”. That is not the case and we also need to think about the kinds of business which we desire, which may stay away after “big box” develops. Regulating retail development in this way would assure that we will have some quality and attractive development here at a reasonable and compatible scale, without the big box traffic, the likes of which most people can’t even imagine.
Beyond this long-term vision issue for the Gateway area, traffic in general is an issue of concern on top of Westbrook’s list, and it is impossible to separate that from the issue at hand. There is a recent article in the packet sent to you by Westbrook Our Home which contains very relevant and credible information as to the serious detrimental effects of traffic from “big box”, and particularly supercenter, development. You cannot simultaneously acknowledge to citizens that you realize Westbrook already has serious traffic problems, assure them that you are working on that issue, and at the same time promote “big box” development, which as a matter of absolute fact draws huge amounts of regional traffic. It would be hypocritical to do those two things at the same time; it is as simple as that. Big-box retail, particularly when it includes grocery space, generates traffic numbers that you will find hard to even believe. And often those numbers are underprojected by developers’ traffic studies. It is naive for anyone to think such traffic will be confined to the turnpike and arterial, or that if the numbers are too large, it won’t be permitted. And road improvements whose purpose is to move large amounts of traffic serve only the development and the traffic-they do not do a thing for residential areas and in fact denigrate them.
Yes, “big box” is at our door-practically knocking it down. Other possibilities for the area may not be quite so quickly or easily obtainable and no, they may not pay the owners of the property quite as much. But I know for a fact that such other opportunities do exist, and they have been successfully brought to fruition in other places around Maine and the country.
For these reasons I implore you to take the initiative to review the zoning and planning for this area with each other, the land owners, the public, our administration and staff. The direction we go in needs to be well-reasoned, with eyes wide open. What we do here needs to be an affirmative choice-not an inevitability based on an idea from many years ago, while the impacts of that idea have since changed, dramatically.
Please adopt the site plan standards recommended to you by the Planning Board, with the exception of the single-building size limitation, which I ask you to reduce to 80,000 sq. ft. A 1999 study in Easton, Maryland concluded that “[o]nce a big box retail store exceeds 65,000 sq. ft, it is of such a scale that its negative impacts outweigh its positive ones.” During the Planning Board deliberations, a motion for a limit of 80,000 sq. ft. was made; it failed at that time only by a 4-3 vote.
A permitted size of 160,000 sq. ft. or larger will assure swift “big box” proliferation and another ugly, noisy, paved, traffic-congested, glowing, generic strip. We can do better than this, and we have the great opportunity to do better than this, but that opportunity is closing.
Sincerely,
Eileen Shutts
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