Walmart gets set to open new store near Burbank Empire Center

After a few years of legal issues and pushback from some residents, Walmart will soon open the doors of its 143,000-square-foot store adjacent to the Burbank Empire Center.

Panthi Patel, manager for the new Walmart Supercenter, said a definite grand-opening date has not been set , but he expects the store will be open by late June.

NEWSLETTER: Stay up to date with what’s going on in the 818 >>

While waiting for the doors to open, Patel has been busy hiring about 350 workers for the discount giant’s new store. Of the employees hired, about 30 to 40 of them live in Burbank.

“But I could be hugely underestimating that,” he added.

“We had a temporary hiring site open at the Burbank [Town Center], and we were hiring people since the last week of March,” he said. “We just closed that hiring site [on May 13], so we were in there for about six to seven weeks, going through interviews and hiring associates for the store.”

The new location, formerly a Great Indoors store, is one of the first of its kind in the area. There is a store in Panorama City, but Patel said residents in Burbank, Glendale and the surrounding area didn’t have a Walmart close by.

Some Burbank residents in the past have spoken out against the project, saying that the store would increase traffic and crime in the area. They were also concerned about how Walmart treats its employees and the impact the retailer would have on local businesses.

However, Patel said he has heard “real positive feedback” from those who entered the hiring office and inquired about the store.

“People shopping in the mall would stop by regularly and thanked us that we were going to be opening,” he said.

The controversy regarding the local Walmart dates back to 2011, when the store was expected to open in 2013. However, three residents filed a lawsuit against the city, claiming that construction of the new store should not start until street improvements were made to accommodate increased traffic.

In 2013, a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge sided with the residents and ruled that the city failed to implement traffic-mitigation measures for the project.

Join the conversation on Facebook >>

However, Walmart appealed and, in 2015, the Second District Court of Appeal sided with the retailer, partially overturned the lower court’s ruling and allowed construction to begin.

Though the appeals court said that the city should not have barred Walmart from receiving building permits, it agreed that Burbank needs to address the traffic issue.

Burbank was ordered to implement the mitigations, which included adding more turn lanes on Buena Vista Street at Victory Boulevard and Empire Avenue or conducting a new environmental review to show the effects of altering or removing the mitigations.

The new study determined that removing the remaining traffic measures would result in “significant cumulative impacts” to traffic. However, completing them would cost Burbank about $15 million and would dislocate several businesses in the area because of required land acquisitions to widen the street — something city officials said years ago that they didn’t want to do.

In one of the original measures, the city was required to build two left-turn lanes on eastbound Victory and southbound Buena Vista. Most the improvements were made, but one more left-turn lane on Buena Vista needs to be built to complete the requirements.

On April 26, the Burbank City Council agreed with city staff, which said that the traffic improvements were not needed currently, but might be required in 20 years. Council members then unanimously voted not to move forward with the measures and to adopt the original environmental impact report with the new study to justify that the additional traffic measures wouldn’t be needed.

--

Anthony Clark Carpio, anthonyclark.carpio@latimes.com

Twitter: @acocarpio