Shopping Center Wins a Grudging Poway OK

Creekside Plaza, a $20-million shopping center that Poway officials hope will form the nucleus of an unofficial downtown for the sprawling North County “city in the country,” has received unanimous but grudging approval from the City Council.

After nearly five hours of equally divided pro and con testimony, the City Council late Tuesday night finally approved changes in the commercial development that the developers said were needed to make the project successful.

“We were promised a restaurant row,” one irate Poway resident said. “Instead, we get another grocery store.”

The shopping center, to be built on the south side of Poway Road on a 17-acre tract between Community and Midland roads, was first approved last year and was slated to contain an eight-screen cinema, a variety of restaurants, a “junior” department store and a few specialty shops--all businesses that Poway lacks.

But the slumping economy and changing merchandising trends, along with Poway’s off-freeway location brought refusals by department store chains, even though the closest competition was miles away.

“We tried them all, and the answer was the same,” E. Rex Brown, senior vice president of the development firm, said. “They told us there’s not the customer base here, and that it’s too far from the freeway.” So the developers asked the city to amend the Creekside Plaza to replace the department store with an Albertson’s supermarket.

At Tuesday night’s marathon hearing, Poway merchants protested the city’s financial participation in the new shopping center and the impact of yet another supermarket in the city.

The five existing grocery stores in the city serve as magnets, attracting shoppers to other smaller shopping centers in the city, local businessman Kyle Everson said.

The greatest fear, Everson said, is that a newer, larger supermarket may take away so much business, the five other markets and smaller firms in the older shopping centers could fail.

Poway teen-agers presented petitions signed by dozens of their peers asking the council to approve the new shopping center because of the 10-screen Edwards Theatres planned in the center.

Other proponents pointed out that Poway has no upscale attractions such as boutiques and name restaurants to draw both local and outside customers into Poway’s business section.

Mayor Jan Goldsmith defended the project, comparing it with Escondido’s North County Fair, which was built with city redevelopment agency help. Downtown Escondido merchants suffered and are still suffering from the drain of shoppers from the downtown to the mall, he said.

“But we are building this smack in the center of Poway Road, in the center of the city,” Goldsmith said. “It will draw people from outside into our business district, and it’s up to small business along the way to let people know they are there.”

The mayor acknowledged that local stores would lose some businesses to the new center, but predicted that, eventually, the infusion of shoppers from nearby San Diego suburbs would work to the benefit of all merchants.

Ed Malone, retired developer who owns a shopping center directly across Poway Road from the future Creekside Plaza, criticized the city for giving the center’s developers an unfair advantage.

He said the city was inappropriately using redevelopment funds to clear the site of a dilapidated trailer village inhabited by poor families and charging the costs of their relocation to city’s money set aside for affordable housing.

About $12 million has been spent to acquire the aging eyesore, to relocate the residents to new manufactured housing units being built south of Creekside Plaza and for flood control measures to protect both the housing and commercial projects.

Malone said the city “has broken most of the zoning laws it holds others to” in encouraging the shopping center development and “is constructing low-income housing at an astronomical cost.”

“How about helping us guys who have been trying to make a living in increasingly tough times, who have been generating tax revenues for the city for years?” Malone asked the council members. “You do little to help the little guys who live and work here.”

Councilman Tony Snesko voted for the shopping center revisions reluctantly, commenting, “I believe it is going to adversely effect Poway. That’s free market competition, but we involved ourselves.

“I don’t think we should have approached the developer, and we should not have committed the money to this.”

Also unhappy about the divisive issue was Councilman Bob Emery.

“We just spent five hours discussing something that was decided beforehand,” Emery said before casting a vote for the revised project. “You had three votes for it when we came in here.”