Poway Gets Down to Business : Planning: Decision is due on a radically revised shopping center plan, amid fears it’s what the city doesn’t need.

Poway’s image as a city in the country could stand a bit of polishing. Despite its standing as the North County’s most affluent community with the highest per capita income of any incorporated city in the county, Poway comes off as a strip of small businesses, much like the suburb of a major metropolis.

Far from the freeway, hidden in the hills that rise into the rugged San Diego County back country, Poway lacks the hub around which a proper city could grow, to which outsiders and locals alike are attracted.

The efforts of city officials to remedy this situation began almost three years ago, and the results will be decided tonight when the Poway City Council will act on approving a major shopping center, Creekside Plaza, as the beginning of the city’s future downtown.

In the beginning, Creekside Plaza was to be the site for businesses the city lacked--a small department store, a major movie theater, some popular restaurants and a smattering of upscale shops and boutiques.

All of these, it was felt, would bring shoppers, diners and visitors to Poway. More importantly, the new center would keep Poway residents at home, spending their dollars in Poway and not in the surrounding restaurants and shopping centers in Escondido and San Diego.

Poway businessmen and merchants were wary of the proposal from the beginning, fearing its impact on their establishments.

Jim Faaborg, whose auto body repair business would be unaffected by competition from the new shopping center, still opposes it.

“We were promised something like a restaurant row, a place where people could go out in the evening to dine, and where all the workers at the business park on the hill could come down for lunch and spend a dime in Poway. There are no restaurants in town now,” Faaborg said.

Faaborg fears the impact on other older shopping centers that line Poway Road after Creekside Plaza attracts “all the best businesses and leaves a bunch of boarded-up buildings. This town could turn into a ghost town.”

A part of the problem is the rundown trailer park that occupies part of the shopping center site on the south side of Poway Road between Midland and Community roads.

The city’s redevelopment agency is spending about $8.5 million to acquire the dilapidated trailers, to develop a 65-home subdivision of manufactured housing in which to relocate the trailer park tenants and to tame the creek and to restore the riparian habitat along the stream that crosses the property where the housing development and shopping center will be built.

City Manager Jim Bowersox calls the expenditure “a bargain.” He estimates that the three-and four-bedroom subdivision homes with their tiled roofs and landscaped yards will cost the city about $130,000 each.

In addition, it will add to the city’s meager supply of “affordable housing,” required by state and federal governments, and will remove the admitted eyesore of the old trailer park from the prime commercial site along Poway Road to make way for the new Creekside Plaza.

As for the shopping center, Bowersox feels the city is getting a good deal, although the developer, ADI Properties, has failed to sign a department store tenant to anchor the development.

E. Rex Brown, senior vice president of ADI Properties, concedes defeat in the search for a small dry goods store after more than two years’ search. Major chains won’t venture into Poway, he said, because of the low-density residential development that Poway espouses. A department store requires a site in a major shopping center surrounded by high-density residential development, preferably with freeway frontage, Brown said.

Brown blames the failure to find a department store tenant partly on the economic downturn, which began at about the same time as the shopping center planning started. Changes in the retail industry, including many consolidations and bankruptcies, and a trend toward fewer, larger stores made ADI’s search for a dry goods chain impossible, he said.

So the developer has returned to the city and asked for change in plans to allow a supermarket instead.

Tonight, Brown will ask the city to approve the changes allowing the construction of a 160,810-square-foot center featuring an Albertson’s supermarket; a 10-screen Edwards Theaters cinema; Brigantine and Boll Weevil restaurants; a dozen small specialty shops and a plaza and outdoor amphitheater.

The proposed shopping center is touted as being a focal point for community activities.

According to Brown, the development would establish the area as an unofficial downtown; would complement the Poway tradition of “city in the country” living with its park-like atmosphere; would keep Poway residents shopping at home and would attract shoppers from north Poway, Carmel Mountain Ranch, Sabre Springs, Rancho Bernardo and other nearby suburbs.

The developer claims the center would generate an estimated $6 million in sales tax revenues in its first year of operation.

Ed Malone, a developer who owns a shopping center across Poway Road from the proposed Creekside Plaza, opposes the competing center, but says he’s keeping his tactics secret until tonight’s hearing.

Councilman Tony Snesko, who will cast one of the five votes deciding the fate of the shopping center, thinks the proposal is a bad deal for the city. “The city has been had,” he said.

“The developer sold this to the city as a way to capture the taxes being spent by Poway residents outside Poway. They promised a department store, which Poway doesn’t have, and now they say they will give us a supermarket, which we already have plenty of,” Snesko said.

“Any developer could have told us, when the city started this three years ago, that the demographics weren’t there to attract a small department store. The city failed to get any guarantees, and the developer was given a carte blanche check. I don’t think it was implied from the start that, if they couldn’t get a department store, we’d settle for a grocery store.

“It’s not going to attract new business to Poway,” Snesko said. “It is going to take business away from other Poway businesses. It is an absolute waste of $13 million dollars of taxpayers’ money.”

Snesko defends his financial assessment of the project by pointing out that the council at first allocated $10 million for the relocation of the trailer park families, the creek improvements, land preparation and the affordable housing construction. Later, another $2 million was allocated to the project and about $1 million more will be needed for traffic improvements and other amenities for Creekside Plaza, Snesko said.

“I don’t see Poway ever recovering from what this council has done,” he added. “It is a waste of $13 million of taxpayers’ money, and the rest of Poway Road business will shrivel up and die in the next 10 years because we moved ahead before the market demand was there.”