Walmart Building Underway, not all Neighbors Happy

At least one neighborhood leader and the woman who wants to win west Midtown's vacant state House seat both say the new Walmart rising on Martin Luther King, Jr. Avenue lacks the localization won in other neighborhoods.

The Walmart at Historic Westside Village is expected to create 200 jobs and fix the "food desert" — lack of fresh groceries — in the English Avenue and Vine City neighborhoods when it opens in early 2013.

But unlike the Howell Mill Walmart development, the neighbors did not get the chance to push for architecture that matches the area, or their preference on products, hours, lighting, and other things. Nor is there an offer of $100,000 for community improvements that Howell Mill builder Selig Enterprises pledged to Berkley Park.

"When you have it in historic Martin Luther King, Jr. Drive," said Yvonne Jones, chair of Neighborhood Planning Unit L, "it could have reflected historic asthetics."

Jones spoke as a panelist at a May 16 meeting of the Northwest Community Alliance. The Alliance aims to bring together neighborhoods and developers in the interest of "smart growth."

"We never had a chance to talk to the developer," said fellow panelist Mable Thomas, a former member of both Atlanta City Council and the Georgia House of Representatives, who is running for a newly-redrawn district now held by retiring state Rep. Kathy Ashe, D-Atlanta.

Thomas said local residents might have been able to get some jobs or contracts set aside for them, or negotiated for a Walmart with independent, local businesses inside, as some locations have.

City Councilman Ivory Lee Young, Jr. called their concerns "relevant," but said many things made the Walmart deal a "tenouous" one that had to be acted on quickly. "A grocery store on that site had been called for for thirty years," he said, and added he was glad that it's finally been delivered.

A job training program is being prepared, Young said, for area residents to learn customer service and other retail skills. Walmart agreed, he said, that program graduates would have right of first refusal when hiring begins later this year.

Young and Thomas are still negotiating with Walmart on some of their concerns.

Scott Selig, part of the Hamiton Mill Walmart developer's company, said the economy now can't be compared to a decade ago when financing was easy and businesses were expanding. "Now if you get any retailer coming to you, you are blessed," he said.

At the same meeting, the man who oversees the Georgia Dome said a study is still in the works that would quantify traffic and parking demand along North Avenue if a new stadium is buit on the north side of the Georgia World Congress Center campus.

After that, "then we will think about how to tie in with MARTA," said Frank Poe, executive director of the Georgia World Congress Center Authority.

The Atlanta Falcons are in negotiations with GWCC about getting a new stadium to replace the two-decade-old Georgia Dome. Poe said the south end of the campus is also a possibility for any new arena. It would be financed by the Falcons, other events, sponsorship and naming rights, vendors and a hotel-motel tax in the city of Atlanta. It would have to be approved by city council and the state of Georgia. The total bill would come to something above $1 billion, and could be ready as early as 2017.

The existing Georgia Dome's bonds will be paid off between 2018 and 2020. The Falcons would be locked into any new stadium until its government obligations are fully paid.