Map of the area where construction will take place. Will update with renderings when available.
Trash was one of the hot topics of the night Jan. 23 at a Glen Meadow Estates Home Owners Association meeting with a broker, architect, realtor and civil engineer behind the proposed Walmart and Sam’s Club development at LBJ and Midway.
Zoning was filed Jan.22, and if approved, a new Walmart and Sam’s Club will occupy the space where the existing strip center is, says broker Jim Christon of Christon Company. The entire strip center would be demolished except for Midway Point and In-N-Out Burger.
Spanish Point Apartments, the now empty North Ridge Apartments and Townhomes and existing Walmart grocery in Farmers Branch would also be demolished. The Sam’s Club on Belt Line (Addison) would shut down due to the new one being built.
Three new leases will be on the market, and neighbors fear the spots will be occupied by fast food chains.
Zoning is expected to be approved by May or June 2013, which means Walmart and Sam’s won’t close on the property until fall 2013. The two stores are expected to occupy a little more than 300,000 square feet, which is 400,000 square feet less than the strip and apartments currently take up.
Neighbors expressed concerns about trash bags cluttering their neighborhood and the smell of old food wafting into their backyards. Civil engineer Dan Millner of Kimley-Horn and Associates, Inc., says that won’t be a problem because contractors will build a 12-13 foot divider wall, and Millner says trash will be tightly sealed in containers in and outside the stores. The neighbors aren’t buying it.
Another concern was that truck delivery would cause unpleasant noise. Millner says the city mandates that no deliveries be made between the hours of 10 p.m.–7 a.m. and that Walmart generally doesn’t deliver products between 7–9 a.m. due to traffic.
The conversation really got heated when neighbors asked what route the delivery trucks would take to reach the stores and the response was “LBJ to Midway.” That’s when nearly the entire room erupted with complaints that traffic is bad enough.
At one point the engineer had to tell residents to “please calm down.”
It seems the only thing the neighbors could agree on is demolition of the apartments, which have had problems with prostitution, drugs and other criminal activity. HOA president Al Daniels says that 80 percent of children at Tom C. Gooch Elementary School live/lived in those apartments. He say’s with the demolition there is a chance for Gooch to become a “really good neighborhood school.”
The HOA is hosting another meeting at 7 p.m. tonight, Jan. 24, at the Rosser Park Club House on 4008 Rosser Square.
