bad, bad Safeway

In 2000, the Menlo Park City Council tasked Safeway and the local neighborhood to work together to come up with a plan for a new store at Middle Avenue and El Camino Real.  The Safeway Working Group was formed; a member since its inception, I penned a way of working together to address concerns and issues with complete resolution in order to move the project forward (which served, in part, as inspiration for my Series on Success Cross-Functional Team Leadership.)

Working Group members spent countless hours over the last 10 years in Working Group, Sub-group, Neighborhood, and City meetings, to come up with a successful project as endorsed by us to the City Council in 2005.  And hundreds, if not thousands of additional hours in addressing issues in the demolition, Conditions of Development, construction, and operational issues of the new store including; noise, parking, flooding, trash, pedestrian and bike access, aggressive panhandling, landscaping, security, and yes even the Menlo Park Safeway employee arrested in a sting operation selling methamphetamine to undercover police officers in the parking lot.

As you may have heard or read, I appealed a new use permit for Safeway that would effectively increase the square footage of the retail stores by hundreds of square feet, on grounds that they have not complied with their own Conditions of Development (CoD) in the following areas:

    * Safeway Van Parking.  The City Planner negated the CoD by allowing Safeway to park the Safeway.com delivery vans in customer parking - the CoD calls for them to be parked there limited hours.  The City Planner should not change the CoD regarding parking until all the retail space is full for a holiday period, to understand potential impacts before changing CoD.
    * On-site Banking:  CoD calls for on-site banking, currently there is only an ATM machine and the ability for employees to cash paychecks at the service desk.
    * Safeway is two years in arrears on Transportation Demand Management Program reporting, and the current plan they submitted (Dec. '09) has no checks and balances, or employee surveys attached.
    * CEQA Exemption.  California Environmental Quality Act.  Sometime in 2007 Safeway slipped in CEQA exemption into the project.  This is simply unacceptable and should be revoked.
    * In addition I would like to see the addition of a "smoking area" and have all the store fronts be non-smoking.

As you all know, I support outdoor seating for both Peet's and Rubio's.  And, while the above has little to do with outdoor seating, this is a last-ditch effort to hold Safeway responsible for the promises they broke since we endorsed the project in in 2005.

http://safewayphotos.blogspot.com/
http://moresafewayphotos.blogspot.com/