Planning Board scolds Home Depot Team
Published on September 13th, 2006
STONEHAM, MA - The town's Planning Board scolded the proponents of a proposed Home Depot along Fallon Road last Wednesday after the applicants ignored a demand for a study of traffic patterns of nearby home improvement centers.
According to Planning Board Chairman August Niewenhous, a supplemental traffic report submitted just prior to last Wednesday's meeting failed to scrutinize traffic counts at nearby Home Depot locations such as Somerville and Reading - information specifically requested by Planning Board members last July.
"I'm very much in a quandary as to why, when we ask for something, you exclude that criteria," chastised Niewenhous, directing his remarks to David Armanetti, a senior project manager for 225 Fallon Road's property owner, the Richmond Company.
"You used that as an arbitrary criteria out of the context that the board asked for by excluding Reading and Somerville," the Planning Board Chair added, referring to the study focus of Saugus, Danvers, and Quincy stores.
Wilmington's The Richmond Company, which purchased the 16.2-acre lot from the A.W. Chesterton Company last year for $7.4 million, recently submitted a request seeking a special permit for an 133,000 square foot Home Depot and adjacent three-floor 15,000 square-foot office park at the site.
The former A.W. Chesterton Company site is located in south Stoneham near the I-93 North on-ramp which is situated close to the former MDC pool area along Main Street, as well as Park and Marble Streets.
Although the property is zoned for commercial uses, the applicants need a special permit to waive zoning bylaws that cap a retail development at 75,000 square feet. Since the project, labeled Stoneham Crossings by the developers, came before the Planning Board last July, a sea of neighborhood opposition has voiced concerns with project-associated traffic - estimated at over 3,200 more cars per day.
Defending their decision to exclude the Somerville and Reading locations, Armanetti and Jason Floyd, a Richmond Company retained traffic consultant, argued that the presence of additional retail uses at those locations prevented adequate counts from being taken.
Specifically, the pair contended, the traffic numbers would be skewed by customers who intended to frequent another establishment, but decided to stop at the home improvement store afterwards because they were already out.
"When you have more than one retail store on a site, you create a different animal. So you may have people who are going to Jordan's Furniture, but then say, 'I might as well go to the Home Depot [while I'm here],'" the traffic consultant claimed.
"Home Depot projects that were located at multi-tenant retail centers, where we can't tell who's going to which door, we excluded from the study," Armanetti chimed in. "So we took a big picture look at all of the existing locations, and then we said, 'what stores can we look at to get an accurate technical outlook at traffic?'"
Willing to concede that point, the Planning Board requested information on the number of transactions or sales at the Reading and Somerville establishments, a figure that might provide insight into the number of patrons traveling into those locations.
However, if that information is unable to be obtained - the senior project manager predicted that such data might be protected proprietary information - the group made it clear that they fully expected the original traffic report on Somerville and Reading.
"If you can't [get us the transaction numbers], just give us the traffic studies for Reading and Somerville," Planning Board member Kevin Dolan matter-of-factly directed the proponents.
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