DRIPPING SPRINGS — Plans to bring a large store to the city of Dripping Springs are moving forward, as the Dripping Springs Board of Adjustments (BOA) and Dripping Springs City Council approved the necessary requests and amendments last week.
At its March 4 meeting, the BOA unanimously approved a variance to allow a building larger than 50,000 square feet in a Commercial Services (CS) Zoning District. At its meeting on the same day, council approved a zoning map amendment to rezone the existing H-E-B site from Planned Development District 1 (PDD 1) to CS.
This comes after both items were brought before the Planning & Zoning Commission Jan. 27. The zoning amendment was unanimously approved, but the commission voted to postpone the variance request to allow the applicant to provide additional information and, after an additional staff presentation Feb. 25, it was unanimously approved.
H-E-B is wanting to construct a new, larger store for residents of Dripping Springs, due to the growth the community has seen in recent years. Because of this, the variance would allow a structure up to 150,000 square feet, which exceeds the allowable 50,000 square feet, in the CS Zoning District. The subject property includes both the current H-E-B site and an 11.73-acre tract of land to the east, recently acquired by H-E-B; the properties are combined into a single parcel, as the applicant intends to construct a new H-E-B store on the eastern portion of the site and the existing store will then be demolished and replaced by parking for the new facility.
“We have a current store in Dripping Springs. It has a lot of people in it. Our trade area is considerably larger than the city limits of Dripping Springs. We’re seeing, in that trade area, since we built the store, the population has doubled,” said H-E-B Senior Engineer Kathy Strimple. “We're also seeing, projecting in the next few years, a housing growth of another 8,000 homes, which equates to about another 25% population growth. Our store’s crowded today and we're expecting that to increase.”
The existing store that is in Dripping Springs — located at 598 East US 290 — is sitting at about 68,000 square feet, while the “new, bright and shiny” H-E-Bs that are popping up are about 120- to 130,000 square feet, Strimple said.
The project does require changes and a variance to accommodate the larger size. While the BOA and council, respectively, voted to approve these, concerns were still raised about traffic impacts and the need for a Traffic Impact Analysis (TIA) and those on the dais emphasized the importance of addressing traffic and wastewater issues before construction.
BOA Chair and Mayor Bill Foulds said that though he understands that H-E-B is just in the beginning stages of this project, without any set plans, there have been some Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) plans for Rob Shelton Boulevard — the road that the store is located off of — to add another lane for right turns, implementing two turn lanes. He asked whether this would involve removing the H-E-B gas station.
“The fuel station will remain where it is. So, we're not planning to move the fuel. TxDOT will reconstruct Highway 290 into six lanes and a divided median … In the process, they're going to widen the approach to Rob Shelton on both sides, so, northbound on our side, southbound on the other side,” Strimple explained. “When they do that, you'll have two left turn lanes … going north from H-E-B, you'll have two left turn lanes, one straight-through lane and a channelized right turn lane. So, you have basically four lanes at the light, where there's only two today, and that helps improve the timing of the signal because it operates on a split phase today.”
Strimple continued to state that TxDOT will need right-of-way from H-E-B, but that does not hit the paving around the fuel station, so “we're in good shape.” At the time H-E-B applies for a building permit — whether that be in three, five or seven years — Strimple said that she suspects they may need to complete a TIA, if traffic increases over a certain threshold.
“I think that we can build a store of about 100,000 to 105,000 [square feet] without adding too many trips to kick in the need for us to study the traffic. If the store is, and I'm guessing, but if the store is 105,000 to 120,000, we will have to do a TIA and we will have to address the conditions that exist at that time,” she said. “So, it's hard to say what might be required because things are changing out there, and the traffic is going to continue to grow, but I don't think that we could comply with your code and put a 120,000 square-foot store out there today without doing something.”
Board and council member Wade King said that the acreage H-E-B purchased to the east of the existing store, which is where the new store would eventually be located, has several large oak trees and a few heritage trees.
“I'm just concerned between TxDOT right-of-way and your new store, every single one of them is going to get bulldozed,” King said. “I wonder, in the future, at an appropriate time, if it's possible to bring the tree survey in and an expanded view of what we're looking at here with the schematic, with the tree survey in your proposed building, where we can see what trees, what size they are, which ones are going to go and which ones have a chance.”
Strimple said that the development will come under the city’s new tree preservation ordinance, so H-E-B will have to comply and there are different ways to do so, including preservation, replanting by way of mitigation and fee-in-lieu of planting.
There is no estimated construction timeline, as the applicant was just looking at the zoning and variance requests, along with needing to address other issues, such as utilities.
“Dripping Springs is one of the highest pressured stores in this area. That's why we're here. That's why we've made the investment that we made in a show of faith because we want to be here. So, there's a lot of concern for us, for the amount of people, the customers per square foot that we push through the Dripping Springs store is very high when compared to the level of service,” Strimple said. “It's very crowded. The parking lot is very crowded. The store is very crowded all the time. So, there's a high volume of people that we push through there. That's a metric for us that says we need to do something about this because it drives customer dissatisfaction.”
Dripping Springs City Council will meet next at 6 p.m. March 25. To view the full agenda documents related to H-E-B’s requests, visit www.drippingsprings-tx.municodemeetings.com.
