Q&A Sessions

This proposed Home Depot would probably require an equivalent number of vehicle trips to the Watsonville Home Depot. The EIR for the Watsonville Home Depot forecasts about 5000 vehicle trips per day to the site. There is every reason to believe that a similar if not greater level of traffic would come to a Delaware Avenue location. ALL of that traffic would have to use Delaware Avenue, Fair or Swift streets, and Mission Street. There is NO WAY to adequately modify neighborhood streets for such a commercial traffic load and still preserve the residential character of those neighborhoods. Inevitably, some percentage of the traffic would travel onto other adjacent neighborhood streets changing their character as well.

This is, quite simply, a bad location for this type of business. Home Depots are typically right near a freeway. They also typically draw from a seven-mile diameter circle of resident customers. But, the Santa Cruz site does not and cannot have such a central location among its likely customers. To the West, the City Limit boundary marks the end of residential development. Beyond that are coastal farms and virtually no customers. To the South, the ocean shore is less than a mile away and, similarly, very few customers will come from beyond the shoreline. To the North, only a band of homes about a mile wide exists. So, a home depot at the Delaware location would have a distorted pattern of customer locations with a super majority of the customers necessarily coming ONLY from the East. Unlike most other large box stores, virtually all of the major traffic flow would come from a single direction, our Mission Corridor.

In recent years, Santa Cruz went through a significant public planning and decision-making process regarding Mission Street. We decided it should be built as it is presently and we certainly DID NOT contemplate a use such as Home Depot on the far West Side of Santa Cruz. A Planning process that would violate those decisions now would be a total betrayal of all those residents and businesses that spent years in deciding the future shape of the Westside and Mission Street.

When big box stores such as Home Depot open, they inevitably cause the closure of small businesses that offer similar products and services. Santa Cruz has large numbers of such small businesses. This would be devastating to many of them. Then, with such a distorted geographic location compared to the typical Home Depot business plan, there is a real possibility that the Home Depot would not even survive at this location. Either way, many wholesome Santa Cruz businesses would be forced to close and there would be no guarantee of the longevity of the box store that displaced them.

For all of these reasons and some others, it would be a very bad idea.

It’s not a certainty that a project like this one, or any other big box store for that matter, would result in a net revenue improvement for the City. Costs of additional services and closures of existing businesses might exceed any apparent short-term revenue increases from sales tax. A recent study in Orange County showed a negative economic impact from a big box store proposed in that area.

While such a study may not be absolutely required by CEQA, the concept of doing a fiscal impact analysis is precisely within the intent of analyzing the impact of ANY development on the existing community.

Santa Cruz is the home of a great many small businesses. We need to make the climate for such small businesses even better than it is now, encourage more startups, and have good locations for such businesses to grow. The University has already committed to partnership with the City in providing "business incubator" space in the former TI building. The City needs to do its share in fostering development of business facilities on the vacant industrially zoned land on the West side.

The Santa Cruz Transient Occupancy Tax (TOT or hotel tax) is below the average of similar taxes levied in other California coastal communities. Santa Cruz needs to formulate a consensus plan to increase the TOT at least to the coastal community average and apply the proceeds directly to the General Fund. Previous proposals for an increase in the Santa Cruz TOT were defeated because they were earmarked for specific uses that community groups opposed. Santa Cruz badly needs general fund revenue and a general fund proposal would only require a 50% plus one vote for passage. Measures with proceeds earmarked for specific purposes require a two-thirds vote for passage and that is virtually impossible if there is any opposition at all.

Other revenue measures are possible and likely and need to be explored within a broad based community process so that, as nearly as possible, a community consensus is achieved before any such proposal is placed on the ballot.