Lancaster Ready to Put Parkland in a Big Box
It’s a bold, new front in the “big box” war.
Lancaster is so desperately clinging to tax revenue that it is considering giving up nearly five acres of the city’s signature park and cutting down 100 trees to get a bigger, better Costco in the high desert.
Hemmed in on all sides by competitors, Costco says it will soon close an older store and abandon the town if it doesn’t get a new, prime location--Lancaster City Park.
Hundreds of residents have denounced the idea of a park giveaway, but to no avail. The City Council will take up the issue July 10. The proposal has been approved by the Planning Commission.
The controversy is the latest in a nationwide groundswell of protests against big-box sprawl. Residents and small-business owners have united to strike down megastore proposals in more than 100 far-flung communities from San Juan Capistrano to Wichita, Kan.; and St. Petersburg, Fla. to Plymouth, Maine. The stores are attacked as blights on the landscape that force local merchants into bankruptcy and, increasingly, close their own doors when sales falter, leaving empty warehouses behind.
“In this day and age, cities will do really remarkable things to get a big tax generator like Costco,” said Larry Kosmont, a Los Angeles economic development and real estate consultant. But he added that it is rare for a city to throw parkland on the table. “For better or worse, this is cash-box zoning in its most direct form.”
If the council signs off on the plan, a slice of the 71-acre park, shaded by pines and sycamores, would be replaced by an asphalt parking lot. The Costco store would be built along the southern edge of the oasis, the city’s crown jewel.
“We have so much wide-open desert, I don’t understand why they have to come here,” fumed Jane Pawluk during a recent daily exercise stint in the park with her border collie. A Lancaster resident since 1970, Pawluk said, “I watched this park grow since it was nothing but desert. We should be adding to it, not taking away.
“This is our emerald,” she added. “It doesn’t make any sense to me.”
But city officials say cents--lots of them--are what it’s all about.
Biggest Contributor to City Coffers
Generating annual sales tax revenue of $470,000 to the city, Costco is the single largest contributor to Lancaster’s $33-million budget. City Manager Jim Gilley points out that Costco provides Lancaster with enough money to pay for all the city’s recreation programs, or the net cost of the performing arts center, or all discretionary law enforcement operations, such as stings.
“Take any one of those things away and it would be a serious [infringement] on the quality of life and services we provide,” Gilley said. “It’s no little deal for our residents.”
City leaders say they need to cater to businesses because of mounting competition for revenue, severely curtailed since Proposition 13, the 1978 tax-cutting initiative.
“We have seen the state taking more and more out of local property taxes,” said Gary Hill, Lancaster finance director, citing cigarette taxes as an example.
“The traditional taxes that we used to use for our general fund services have been substantially eroded away,” he said, forcing cities to rely more heavily on sales taxes. Additionally, the city’s sales tax revenue only recently surpassed the peak of 1990 after eight years of a slump during the recession, Hill said.
Lancaster and neighboring Palmdale have fought for years to entice retailers and car dealers away from each other, offering bigger and better incentives. The battle became so intense that the two city councils in 1999 adopted “hands off” agreements. But those are not binding.
Even Costco executives admit the unspoken possibility of a move to Palmdale has driven Lancaster to try harder.
“We’ve never even looked anywhere else, but that’s always a threat,” said Andy Leachman, membership manager of the Lancaster store, about two miles from the park.
Costco officials have said they want to relocate to the southern edge of the city, which is closest to Palmdale and Acton, where the company has no outlets. They also want more parking and a spot next to the Antelope Valley Freeway, the main artery between Los Angeles and points north.
The new, 150,000-square-foot store would be built on 18.9 acres of city redevelopment land, including the park parcel, and feature a 12-pump gas station and a separate 2,500-square-foot restaurant. It would cost $11.5 million to build.
Old Location Is Tricky to Reach
The current store is in the Valley Central complex, one of California’s first retail “power centers,” where shoppers can find everything from wrenches to Bed-in-a-Bag comforter ensembles.
More than 20 years old, the complex is tricky to reach, with no direct access to freeway ramps.
The Costco store is sandwiched between a Wal-Mart and 99-Cents Only store with puce-colored canvas awnings. The jammed parking lot is shared with a new House to Home center, where blue, green and silver tinsel banners stream in the wind for the attention of shoppers. Tempers of drivers competing for parking spaces often match the mercury in the desert thermometers.
“We don’t advertise like normal retailers,” said Leachman, explaining that most everyone in Lancaster knows where the store is. But he admits it could be hard to find for freeway travelers. “If you blink, you could miss us.”
Residents opposed to giving up an inch of their park point to countless acres of barren land stretching between walled-in housing tracts. “Costco could go anywhere and people would know where it is,” said Arnie Wilenken, a member of the Antelope Valley Trails, Recreation and Environmental Council, which has collected hundreds of signatures on petitions opposing the parkland giveaway.
Cooling in the shade of a deodar cedar in the park, Wilenken gestured toward a monotonous, sunbaked wasteland of emptiness across the street. “There is just so much open land,” he said. “It seems so foolish.”
Costco rejected 10 alternative offers from the city, interested only in the park site, which hugs the freeway at Avenue L. The two-lane avenue and freeway overpass are being widened to serve as the main loop to downtown. Major improvements, including turn lanes and traffic lights, are scheduled for completion in November. Costco says it could have its store up and operating by early next spring.
City Says It Would Create New Parkland
The city plans to replace the lost parkland with at least twice the acreage elsewhere.
That would not mollify Robin Collins. She was walking her two dogs through the park, as she does almost every day, when she spotted the thick chalk line running straight through the grass, south of the soccer fields. She also saw yellow dots sprayed on trees, mostly younger and smaller ones.
Collins said she was shocked when groundskeepers told her the area would be bulldozed and that only the marked trees--those easier to move--would be saved. She enlisted an army of friends who said they repeatedly were stonewalled when trying to verify the fate of the park. Only earlier this month, after a barrage of queries from the media, did city officials announce the agreement with Costco.
The deal calls for Costco to trade its 125,000-square-foot warehouse in Valley Central for the parkland.
Some question the wisdom of Lancaster’s taking title to the building. Finding new tenants for such properties is another problem plaguing cities across the country. It would be “our next challenge,” Gilley said.
“It’s an unfortunate commentary,” said Kosmont, the L.A. economic consultant, “but Costco, Wal-Mart and other sales-tax generators are king of the highways and will get whatever they want.”
