But an hour before meeting started, the retail giant withdrew a conditional use request to operate 24 hour a day next to a residential area, along with variance requests regarding modifications to proposed signage and the display of outdoor merchandise.
After hearing from more than two dozen people among a standing-room-only crowd, the board voted:
- To allow Kroger to use striped markings along seven parking areas in front of the store instead of landscaped islands, which instead will be installed in the middle of the parking lot.
- To allow Kroger to "stack" vehicles waiting at drive-through windows on the northern and southern sides of the building for online shopping, pharmacy and bank business, instead of requiring such traffic to the front of the building.
- To deny Kroger requests to exceed the maximum height and intensity for lighting.
- To deny Kroger's request to not install a six-foot wide sidewalk east of the right-turn-in, right-turn-out lanes along Ohio 4.
Residents said they opposed Kroger moving to the new site because it would generate noise, traffic, lighting and crime, disrupting their daily lives, reducing their property values and making it difficult to sell under-construction and existing homes.
They also said it wasn’t enough to have a store 70 feet from a residential property line, even with a 50-foot-wide buffer that will include a 6-foot-high berm with an 8-foot-tall fence on top and both sides of the berm landscaped.
Sherri Green, who lives on Ohio 4 across from the proposed new location, said Kroger didn’t provide enough information for residents to get a clear picture of the effect the new store would have on their lives.
“There’s a lot of the pieces to the puzzle that’s not been completed,” Green said. “Kroger needs to get with the neighborhood around the store, and I think the board should have had more to go on. They shouldn’t have voted on what was given tonight.”
Chastity Williams, who purchased a home near the site in late 2003, said she didn’t appreciate Kroger changing so many requests immediately before the meeting and believes there was “very little communication” between the grocer, the township and residents.
Tim Mara, an attorney representing a neighboring subdivision, said he was disappointed by the ways things were handled at the meeting.
“I think it was extremely unfair for the board of zoning appeals to proceed with a greatly changed application that was changed less than an hour before the hearing began,” Mara said. “If there was going to be such major changes, then the logical thing would be to say, ‘Alright. We don’t even know what’s in this change. The staff hasn’t even had a chance to look at it. Let’s postpone this for the next month’s meeting and figure out what the heck these people are still asking for.’”
Mara said that and other problems “may be fertile ground for an appeal.”
Many residents said they believed Kroger should stay at its current Ohio 4 location and expand there instead of vacating the location and leaving an empty storefront.
Kroger spokeswoman Rachael Betzler said Wednesday that there are many factors that go into what the company is looking for when it is building a store the size of the proposed location.
“We just have to take all those factors into consideration when we’re planning for a new store,” Betzler said.
Expansion of the current 57,000-square-foot store Kroger started leasing at 5420 Liberty-Fairfield Road in 1998 “is not what we’re looking to do,” she said.
Hours of operation at the new store are yet to be determined, Betzler said.
Kroger decided to drop its request to keep the store open 24 hours a day because the current Ohio 4 storefront, like other locations, is not open 24 hours, and company officials felt the new store would not need to be either, she said.
“Every year we evaluate our store operating hours,” Betzler said. “In fact, we just changed nine stores in the division to no longer be open 24 hours. We felt this was not an item that needed to be perused further.”
Kroger’s next step would be to come to the Liberty Twp. Administration Building and apply for a zoning certificate, according to Caroline McKinney, spokeswoman for the township.
“They need to demonstrate they are meeting our zoning code with the two variances they received last night as the exception,” McKinney said.
Kroger does not have a timeline for purchasing the site, starting construction or opening the new location, Betzler said.
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