YORBA LINDA : Council to Consider Aiding Developer

Residents of the city’s Bryant Ranch area are one step closer to having a grocery store and other services in their community.

The City Council agreed last week to consider giving financial help to the developer of a shopping center planned at the corner of La Palma Avenue and Via Lomas de Yorba East.

The area’s closest grocery store now is about eight miles from most Bryant Ranch homes, which are in the southeast corner of the city, according to John O’Meara, a spokesman for Diversified Shopping Centers, developer of the project.

Diversified Shopping Centers asked the city’s Redevelopment Agency to provide $150,000 in financial assistance to help it attract a drugstore and a hardware store to the location. The company also asked for $30,000 to help build a city-required pedestrian pathway to a bike trail south of the project area.

Both a drugstore and a hardware store are considered essential to the success of a neighborhood shopping center, O’Meara said. Ralphs Grocery Co. has leased space at the center with the understanding that the center would contain at least one of those businesses.

But O’Meara said the area’s population of 11,000 is not large enough to attract those types of businesses without offering financial incentives such as rent subsidies.

City officials estimated that the shopping center could generate as much as $200,000 in sales tax revenue and redevelopment taxes for the city’s coffers by the project’s fifth year. The financial assistance would be spread out over five or six years and would come from redevelopment taxes generated by the project.

City Councilman Mark Schwing questioned whether the city should commit redevelopment funds to the project, saying he saw little evidence that an incentive was necessary to ensure the project’s completion.

O’Meara said he did not know if the project could go ahead as planned if the city denies the financial assistance, since bank financing for the project depends in part on the inclusion of a drugstore or hardware store. Groundbreaking is now scheduled for November, with completion expected in June, 1993.

But Schwing argued that Ralphs had already signed a lease and was committed.

Schwing voted in favor of drafting a financial assistance agreement with the developer, but he said he wants to hear more public comment before the agreement comes to the council for final approval.

“I’m just not sure about using tax dollars to bring in competing businesses,” Schwing said.

But Mayor Irwin M. Fried said he is concerned about the lack of services for residents in the Bryant Ranch area. “We’ve got 11,000 people who need a grocery store,” he said.