by JONATHAN YORK
If there is one certainty, it’s a Walmart store. The shape, the scale, the colors, and the traffic are recognizable at once because no other store is quite like the world’s largest retailer.
But in recent years Walmart has been playing down its size and power. The company fashioned a new slogan, committed to selling healthier food, professed concern for its workers, and opened small stores in yuppie neighborhoods. It even changed the way its name is written, making the letters smaller, and replacing its signature star with a computer-age blink.
All the same, Walmart still gets what it wants.
The development team for the store that will be built in Kyle asked the Planning and Zoning Commission Tuesday night to approve its latest plans.
Those plans made two departures from how things are done here: First, the trees in the parking lot would be gathered into clumps rather than spread out to disperse more air and shade. Second, the store would face Interstate 35 instead of facing Kyle Parkway, as the other big stores in that area do.
Commissioner Jenny DiLeo said that Walmart should face Kyle Parkway too. That would be fairer to the other stores, and it could help create an area of more concentrated retail.
During the city’s comprehensive planning process, she said, city leaders had talked about the need to have stores perpendicular to that road.
“Treating each of those stores equally,” she said, “I think that’s really important.”
An engineer hired by Walmart objected that turning everything 90 degrees wouldn’t be so easy. “If you turn the building and make it perpendicular to Kyle Parkway ... there won’t be much of a parking lot,” he said. “Also, just from a Walmart perspective, I think their preference is to face the highway there.”
The other commissioners seemed more excited that Walmart was coming than worried that it would look out of place. The simple presence of Walmart representatives in the room conferred the excitement of a visit by a foreign dignitary.
So when it came to a vote, only Cicely Kay joined DiLeo to oppose granting Walmart’s requests. They took a roll call vote, and DiLeo stretched her dissent into a whole sentence: “Because I don’t feel comfortable making that decision without more information, I say nay.”
This meeting was the first public glimpse at plans for the new store. It was also the first chance to say something in public about those plans.
Alfred Zambrano, who was born and raised in Kyle, said he was “very opposed” to the construction of a Walmart, not least because of the strain on aging East Kyle roads. “I just don’t know why it should be necessary for Kyle residents to foot the bill for the many improvements to infrastructure” that would be necessary if we had Walmart, Zambrano said.
Stella Morgan said that she moved to her home on Brent Boulevard before all the chain stores moved in. “I mean traffic is real bad right now,” she said. “It’s hard to get in and out of our neighborhood right now. [Walmart] will come, but they will come with a price to the people who live over there unless there’s improvements on those roads.”
Another woman said: “I welcome Walmart. Yes, there’s one in Buda. But we need that revenue here.”
