Politics

Supercenters On San Diego City Council Agenda This Week

By Alison St John / Reporter

Published November 2, 2010 at 3:00 AM PDT

This story was published more than 14 years ago.

San Diego City Council will hold a Special Meeting this week to set conditions on big box retailers that want to open supercenters in the city. The proposal is different from the one in 2007, when the council tried to ban supercenters outright.

Supercenters are not your ordinary big-box store. They are mega stores of more than 90,000 square feet that sell groceries as well as other merchandise.

San Diego City Councilman Todd Gloria said he’s concerned that a supercenter could wipe out smaller business nearby, and create traffic problems.

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He's not proposing a ban, rather he wants an ordinance that would require the store to pay for an economic and community impact analysis before the council could grant a permit.

“The city has invested millions of taxpayer dollars to revitalize business districts throughout the city, “Gloria said .“Permitting supercenters that have the potential of decimating those very same business districts -- we’re really working at cross purposes.”

To get a permit, the economic impact analysis would have to find that a superstore would not adversely affect small businesses or neighborhood character.

Wal-Mart is not the only big-box retailer affected by the ordinance, but the company has paid for full page newspaper ads opposing the ordinance.

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Alison St John currently serves as a general assignment reporter and occasionally co-hosts KPBS Midday Edition. She fell in love with KPBS Radio when she arrived in San Diego in 1985 and first heard NPR. She has been a voice on KPBS Radio since 1989, and has served as a news reporter for radio, TV and the web, as well as anchoring, hosting, producing and editing. Alison has reported on stories about North County and was based in the KPBS' North County Bureau. Alison covered the metro beat during the critical period of the San Diego City pension crisis, and the education beat while Alan Bersin was the controversial Superintendent of San Diego City School District. She covered health when the industry was converting to managed care and told welfare reform stories in the late 1990s when Clinton was “ending welfare as we know it.” She has covered land use issues extensively, looking at the challenges of meeting a growing population while preserving community character, and developing a better transportation system to meet environmental concerns. She has done many stories on the military in San Diego, and the series she edited on the challenges veterans face returning from active duty to civilian life won “Best of Show” from the San Diego Society of Professional Journalists. She occasionally hosts the KPBS Roundtable and KPBS Midday Edition. Alison has won awards from the San Diego Press Club, the Society of Professional Journalists, the Associated Press TV and Radio Association, and the California Golden Mike Awards. Alison was born in Tanzania, brought up in Scotland, and earned her degree in psychology and sociology from Durham University in England. Her postgraduate diploma is in student counseling. She worked in England, Nigeria, Switzerland, Belgium, India, and Japan before moving to the United States in 1981. She now lives in Oceanside and enjoys how her community is growing and changing.