Arch Rivals : New McDonald’s OKd Despite Competitors’ Pleas

Hungry? In a hurry? Don’t have a lot of cash? No problem.

Just take a drive over to Atlantic Boulevard in Cudahy, where you can feast on any kind of fast-food grind you’d like: 29-cent tacos, 59-cent hamburgers, grilled Mexican chicken, chili-cheese hot dogs or pizza by the slice.

And if you want to get a little fancier, there’s a handful of smaller, locally owned eateries that will do the trick: Mr. Pete’s Patio, Momma’s Restaurant and La Perla Seafood.

In fact, you can barely drive half a block without passing by one of the 14 restaurants along a one-mile stretch of Atlantic Boulevard, and that doesn’t even include the eats at mini-marts, liquor stores and bakeries that dot the city’s main artery.

But wait, there’s more. By this fall, junk-food fans driving through Cudahy can add to their chow lists the Mother of all Fast Food: a McDonald’s restaurant.

Excellent!

Unless, of course, you happen to own the Taco Bell down the street.

“We don’t need more places to eat,” franchise owner Bert Levy groused last week on the eve of the Golden Arch’s approval. “We need more entertainment, like a theater or a bowling alley or skating rink.”

Levy took his plight to the Cudahy City Council, where he joined a standing-room-only crowd of Cudahy business owners who pleaded with the city to keep Ronald McDonald and his clan away from an area already chock-full of french fries and fried pies.

Levy heads the Cudahy Retail Businessmen Assn., a group of about 100 business owners who say they want to stop all new commercial construction, not just restaurants, until the city “takes a good hard look at where it is going.”

Levy believes that every time the City Council allows another restaurant onto the city’s main drag, the profit pie is divided into smaller pieces, making his slice even smaller.

“We need to have a mix. We need to slow down. We need a moratorium, “ he declared at the last City Council meeting.

The idea was met with stony silence by the council, and quickly rejected. To the city staff and council, halting growth in a cash-poor city like Cudahy is absurd. The last revenue-producing development in the city was the Tianguis food store built in 1987, said City Manager Jack M. Joseph.

In fact, he said, the city has sustained the most effective moratorium known in the free world: an economic recession.

“We are trying to increase the tax base and encourage development, not put a hold on it,” Joseph said.

He points out that the city just completed an exhaustive General Plan update that included an in-depth study of Cudahy’s commercial development.

Joseph suggested that the businessmen’s request for a moratorium is nothing more than a veiled attempt to keep stiff competition, such as McDonald’s, off Atlantic Boulevard.

“It’s a smoke screen,” he said.

Taco Bell owner Levy grudgingly concedes that the competition steams him, but he said it’s the city’s primary responsibility to protect existing businesses.

“Most of us are losing money,” he said. “Some of the businesses here have been here five or 10 years, and they deserve to be able to succeed.”

Joseph said he would love to see a more prosperous business community, but times are tough, and besides, the government can’t legally dictate which stores or restaurants may set up shop in Cudahy. He only half-jokingly suggested that the business owners brush up on economic theory.

“Last time I checked, this was a capitalist society,” he said.

But resident Larry Galvan, who ran unsuccessfully for an open City Council seat in April, said he is well aware of the free-enterprise system. However, Galvan believes that city officials just don’t get the concept of diminishing returns.

“You can handle just so many food businesses until the bottom drops out,” he wrote in a letter to the mayor. “We must protect and support the current business owners in this city who are feeling the pinch of being betrayed by this council.”

Galvan was among about 100 residents and businessmen who presented a protest petition to the council asking the city not to approve the McDonald’s “until the economic base of the city has grown.”

Ronald Dailey, who owns the McDonald’s franchise, along with one in Bell Gardens and one in Maywood, said he doesn’t blame the business owners for wanting to protect their livelihoods. But, he said, competition is the American way.

“The phone company doesn’t even have a monopoly anymore,” Dailey said.

Dailey added that the new McDonald’s will be good for the city because it might attract new consumers and will increase the tax base.

The council apparently agreed. It voted 4 to 1 in favor of the new restaurant. Councilman John O. Robertson cast the dissenting vote, suggesting that the city begin a study of Atlantic Boulevard and its lack of diversity.

The McDonald’s will be part of the K mart shopping center at the corner of Atlantic and Santa Fe Avenue, which City Manager Joseph said is Cudahy’s largest single source of revenue.

An abandoned gas station on the site will be torn down when construction on the new restaurant begins later this month, Dailey said. The new McDonald’s is scheduled to open in November.

After all, competition, is as American as an 86-cent hot cherry pie.