The financial situation looks really grim to me too, and I took a bit of comfort early on in thinking that bankruptcy might be the way out of this mess, but from what I hear, bankruptcy for Vallejo has only allowed them minor structural changes such as renegotiating employment contracts and has cost them a fortune in legal fees. I'm curious about whether they now think that was a good decision for them or if they regret it.

According to this article they didn't have much choice when it came to their labor contracts and bondholders:

"Vallejo had no other options, Marc Levinson, a partner with the Sacramento-based law firm Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP who is drafting Vallejo’s bankruptcy-exit plan, said in a Dec. 3 telephone interview.

“Negotiations broke down and we couldn’t get the concessions from the unions and from the bondholders that would keep us out of bankruptcy,” Levinson said."

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-12-14/vallejo-s-california-bankruptcy-failure-scares-cities-into-cost-cutting.html

But other cities have used Vallejo as the template for NOT declaring bankruptcy for the reasons you have cited.

I believe that labor contracts with Hercules employees have been modified but I don't know anything with regards to the bondholders and their willingness to cut a deal.

Here's your answer, Jeff (from the same article):

"[Stephanie] Gomes, the [city] council member, said the city learned a lesson.

“It’s best to negotiate your way out of the fiscal problem,” she said, “before you go into bankruptcy.”

Tim;
Vallejo paid their attorney's in excess of $8 million dollars in legal fees. I honestly think we can avoid bankruptcy.
An upswing in the economy would be great but we cannot wait the 3 to 5 years for that to happen. City owned land sales are not the answer, new private development on those parcels is part of the answer. There is no one solution, its like rubbing your tummy and patting your head at the same time.

Which is far more difficult than patting your tummy and rubbing your head at the same time.

Well, sure, but we also have Safeways right next-door in Pinole and in Rodeo. By keeping Safeway's stores a few miles away, we have the benefit of getting to shop there (after a short 5-minute 2-mile drive in either direction), and Pinole gets to deal with the traffic. And we're not going to reduce traffic by having a store right at the corner of Sycamore and San Pablo, in spite of all the fluff about the walkable New City: very few people get their groceries on foot or by bike; you need a car to haul the stuff back. Only the people in Sycamore North and the apartments by Rite-Aid will walk. Everyone else will drive. And everyone else's driving guarantees that the interminable red-light waits we now endure at Sycamore/S.Pablo are going to be getting a lot longer, with all that traffic merging in from Safeway. And whereas that little trip to Pinole might be once a week, that time-out at Sycamore/S.P. will be every...single...day.

Does EVERY little town have to build its own 60,000 s.f. Safeway?

The current vision, as designed by broad public participation, and which has drawn most of the new residents over the past decade, is that the days of Hercules being a sleepy bedroom community are ending. There will be issues to manage in the growth of Hercules into a premier example of New Urbanism, but we can show the world how to live better and smarter and with a smaller footprint on the environment. This development will bring some growing pains, like the slightly longer waits at the traffic light at San Pablo and Sycamore, but these sacrifices are well worth it in my view, and far preferable to living isolated in a bedroom community and driving to stores, which is both unpleasant and unsustainable.

Well said Jeff,
I'll not even try to add to that.

@Jeffrey: Traffic congestion is not supposed to be part of the "growing pains" for a New Urbanist community. Neither are big box stores and their asphalt moat for customers to park their cars on. Walmart was not an appropriate development north of us and a 60,000 sq. ft. Safeway is not appropriate south of us. It circumvents one of the prime benefits of living in a walkable, New Urbanist community - having a multitude of smaller commercial establishments within a community of high density residences. I don't want to turn Sycamore Crossing into a carbon copy of the Lucky shopping center across the freeway.

I believe Safeway is intending to close their smaller stores in Rodeo and Pinole once they open this new behemoth store in Hercules. They will want to lure Safeway customers from San Pablo to Crockett there.

Douglas, it's great to see that not everyone who posts here is in favor of growth, any growth, no matter how ugly, so long as it's growth, so help me Commerce.

"...driving to stores...is unpleasant and unsustainable": driving to Pinole has sustained us well enough for 30 years; but driving is, in any event, a red herring, since ANY supermarket placed ANYWHERE will oblige most of the customers to drive. Gotta get the groceries home.

I agree that if one only goes grocery shopping for a family once a week, a car would be necessary to transport the 5 bags of groceries home. The benefit of living within walking distance of one or more grocery stores is that you can easly make more frequent trips and thus only be saddled with carrying only one or two bags home. Local urban grocery stores existed long before most people owned a car.

Douglas, local, pedestrian-served grocery shopping will only happen if we have, not one hypermart, but instead, a series of small grocery stores in each neighborhood. Very few people will live within walking distance of Safeway, and half of those will be RiteAid's elderly neighbors, who may be disinclined to haul ANY amount of groceries by foot through the steeply-crowned traffic-clogged intersection at San Pablo.

As for building a series of small, neighborhood grocery stores: I can't think of any good locations for that. Hercules wasn't built as a center of commerce. We might be better off if we didn't try to force shopping into our town, but instead lived here and shopped in the neighboring towns. They're not far off.

@Douglas Bright - I agree with pretty much everything you are saying. I'm not an enthusiast of a Safeway at this location either, although I could live with it if it met certain design criteria.

Regarding what I'd said about having growing pains in terms of traffic - I agree that the opposite should be true of new urbanism. The issue as I see it is that if we have a new urbanism community whereas those around us don't, then inevitably some of those residents will come to visit our town. If they follow our model, then we can get a lot more people out of their cars eventually, and in the short run, we can be the model for them.

@Glenn - Yes, I agree that there is not enough people living with walking distance of a 60,000 sq. ft. Safeway for it to exist without massive amounts of parking. That is part of the problem. I think the communities along Sycamore, east of San Pablo Avenue, do have the requisite income and density to sustain at least one smaller grocery store with minimal parking being necessary. The same is true of many other kinds of stores with a smaller footprint. Large mega-stores rely on customers streaming in from miles around to sustain themselves - very convenient for out of town shoppers to have one stop shopping, but very inconvenient for the residents who have to live next to them and the local businesses that have to compete with them.

I am too naive to know how many people with how much income is necessary to support a store of any specific size, so I'm not arguing with that point, but the concept of "walking distance" is one of the attitudes that we hope to change with the new urbanism movement. It has long been the view of those who prefer sleepy suburban living that we drive to anything over about 100 yards. This view has been reinforced by urban designs that require people to cross huge parking lots to get to stores. I don't see why any able-bodied person would usually prefer to drive a mile over walking a mile (and then many use that time and energy saved on the treadmill), especially in the generally pleasant weather we have here, and there are a lot of people living within a mile of that intersection.

"Large mega-stores rely on customers streaming in from miles around to sustain themselves - very convenient for out of town shoppers to have one stop shopping, but very inconvenient for the residents who have to live next to them and the local businesses that have to compete with them." Douglas, I completely agree. That's why I think our current situation is so good (we get the convenience of Pinole's big-store shopping without the misery of living next to it), and that's why I don't believe that it is in our interest to duplicate our very own private Pinole right here. We already have the benefits of Pinole-style shopping, and without the mess.

@Glenn - Yeah, but I try to avoid shopping at big box stores anywhere, including Pinole. It would be more convenient if I could walk to my stores, rather than feel compelled to drive miles to get to them. These stores are only convenient in the sense that they offer a large variety of products in one place. They are not convenient to get to, find parking, and get away from, especially when there is traffic.

According the the report, Safeway would like to put another gas station on the corner of Sycamore and San Pablo. What a wonderful gateway to our award winning New Urban village.
Surface parking is wasted space. Most of the time, it is less than half full. Parking spaces don't bring in tax revenue - retail businesses do. Monolithic grocery stores taking up 60,000 square feet do not diversify and secure our tax base for the long term, smaller businesses do. Big box stores detract from the walkability and quality of life of the communities they occupy. This is a deal with the devil. We all dislike Lucky, and wish we could have good grocery options within Hercules, but wouldn't it be better to replace Lucky with 3 or 4 good small grocers, rather than put all our eggs in one Safeway basket?

This location would put the jumbo Safeway at the very center, the heart, of Hercules. What a triumph for the new, walkable, livable city: a civic center consisting of a supermarket, gas stations, parking lots, and a traffic clot that we will all have to sit (and sit, and sit) through every single day forever. No pedestrians in our not-walkable heart, because almost nobody will be willing to walk through that mess (and, anyhow, walk to WHAT?); how many pedestrians do we see braving San Pablo @ Sycamore NOW?

It was public pressure which shot down the WalMart proposal. That WalMart would have been built on Parcel C, far from the center. What makes a Safeway jumbomart so much more romantic than the rejected WalMart that it should serve as our Golden-Gate-Bridge introduction to Hercules, the New and Special City?

@ Douglas - I was also very concerned about the gas station, although my understanding is that it would be on San Pablo but on the the corner of the parcel that is toward Pinole. Still, it is troubling. For many years, at every community update meeting, Steve Lawton showed the same slides of that intersection where the old Shell Station and the parking lot morphed into shops lining the street. As I say, consistent with that vision would be a supermarket that fronts Sycamore and San Pablo, but it would be tragic if that becomes a parking lot for a Safeway store.

There is no doubt that it would be far preferable to have a series of smaller stores like a bakery, a meat shop, a deli, etc., but can we attract those kinds of businesses? I don't know. I had heard a lot of talk of Safeway building on Victoria Crescent, which I think would be far better for our city.

I agree that Safeway at Sycamore Crossing has some of the same features as Walmart on parcel C. There are a few differences, though, too. As I'd said, it is possible to imagine a grocery store at that location that is consistent with new urbanism, say by bringing out the front of the store to the street and having parking underground or at least in a parking garage. It certainly would not be a feature of new urbanism, but not necessarily disruptive of it. Walmart had the additional liability of being associated in the minds of many with cheap junk and unfair labor practices, and it would have stood at the entryway into the waterfront area. Many felt that would cheapen the area and make it hard to attract upscale businesses into the waterfront.

I agree with the Walmart analogy. 60,000 sq. ft. stores are not my idea of a suitable addition to a new urbanist community. As a comparison, the Hercules Lucky store is 61,332 sq. ft. This Safeway development would likely request a similar amount of surface parking as the Lucky shopping center and be just as pedestrian unfriendly as any other suburban mall.
One could fit four or five 10,000 sq. ft. stores in the footprint of one of these Safeways. If one of those stores closes its doors, we still have three or four stores operating while the vacant building owner searches for a new tenant. What happens if Safeway closes its doors? We wait and wait for a new tenant while we collect no tax revenue and the building and grounds are borded up, fencted up, and disintegrate.
Most of a grocery store's sales are not taxed. 60,000 sq. ft. of this valuable land will be taken up with a business that contributes little to our tax income and more land taken up with parking lots that contribute zero.
The parking issue I have could be applied to any potential development on this land and should be put underground, preferably, or in an attractively ornamented 3-4 story parking garage with businesses on the ground floor. However, I've never seen a Safeway with this parking arrangement.

@Jefferey - I would like to believe our neighborhood has the income and density to support these kinds of stores. I don't know who else expressed interest in developing Sycamore Crossing - the city did not divulge if anyone else has. But I'd like to try to find a developer who could create a diverse, vibrant shopping and residential area for Sycamore Crossing. If not, perhaps the city could divide up the land into smaller parcels and sell them to individuals who would develop them based on approved designs that complimented the surrounding neighborhoods and adhered to new urbanist principles.

@Douglas Bright - That would be my preference too, by far. I don't know if that alternative is feasible, but it would be great if it were. If Safeway wants to come to town, Victoria Crescent is a much better alternative, in my opinion.

@Douglas Bright - I have seen grocery stores with this type of parking arrangement in urban areas, although I can't remember if I've specifically seen a Safeway like that. There is parking under a grocery store in Berkeley, in the area near Chez Panisse. I've been to two grocery stores with underground parking garages in Seattle, one in San Diego, and one in Studio City, for a few that I can remember off the top of my head.

The 57,218 sq. ft. Whole Foods on Bay Street in Oakland has 200 parking spaces on its roof. The 71,504 sq. ft. Berkeley Bowl on Heinz Street in Berkeley has some of its parking underground as well. Maybe Safeway could build a two story building - 30,000 sq. ft. on each level with parking on the roof, underground, and/or a parking garage. Doubtful they would do this. Safeway isn't known for their pioneering design.

I think it would be up to the city to offer them a take-it-or-leave it set of design criteria that require it conform to our standards, explaining why Hercules is special in its vision for future development. I agree that it cannot be a Luckys-style design at that location.

Unfortunately, those design standards the city could have held them too (the deed restriction) might be removed, as per the city manager's report.

The weekly city manager's report states the Safeway would be between 55,000-65,000. The removal of the deed restriction that the report talks about is in reference to the Sycamore Crossing Initial Planned Development Plan (IPDP) (http://www.ci.hercules.ca.us/index.aspx?page=562) that will be discarded. City staff determined that the land was not marketable using that plan as the blueprint. I suppose this led to the decision that it was better to have a huge Safeway and a handful of smaller stores and residences (possibly with a massive surface parking lot to service it all) than nothing at all. I do not agree. This has the potential to turn into just another cookie-cutter suburban shopping center.

I agree with Douglas's do-not-agree. SomethingAnything is NOT better than "nothing". This Something would be actually deleterious to the quality of life here; and, the "nothing" we had before was trees and fields and peace and beauty.

Selina, perhaps the Bayfront Community can voice our concerns for Sycamore Crossing much like you helped us do for Sycamore North?

Douglas, I agree that we should get bayside folks together and form a consensus on this one. I'll work on an outreach communication about the upcoming changes. I don't remember this going out to the community for input at all. As If we are "removing deed restrictions" that were the result of a city wide charrette (the IDPD), is it proper to be so sly about it? After all, every complaint that I made about SN was met with the assertion that it was to be matched by Sycamore crossing as part of the downtown plan. A plan wholely abondanded at this point. We are also not being told about the potential SN buyers proposed modifications to SN.
Glenn has a point about preserving the quality of life here which includes trees, fields and what others may see as "nothingness" and some of us enjoy as peacefulness.

Thank you Selina. I think the city staff rightly assumes that the more the residents know about these behind the scenes discussions, the more likely we will raise concerns. The problem, of course, that if you only involve the community at the last moment, then the project as plan could be completely abandoned and all that time they spent negotiating and designing is wasted. It's always better to consult openly and transparently with the public from the very beginning so that unacceptable ideas get discarded or ammended immediately, before too much time and money is wasted. I understand the Council and staff probably think we should just let them do the job they were hired to do, but for large and important decisions like this, the public really needs to be front and center in the decision-making process. The whole point of having a City Council and staff is so that the public doesn't need to deal with the day to day essential functions of government, not so that large projects could be 95% complete before they are presented to the public for discussion.
I believe that staff and Council are generally responsive to the public, but we all should have been asked long ago about whether or not we wanted to abandon the IDPD for Sycamore Crossing or whether or not we wanted a 60,000 sq. ft. store opening in our city. These are things that need to be discussed publicly right away, not just when the buyer and city are ready to close the deal.

@Jeffrey - Actually, the city manager told me that the deed restriction was concerning the IDPD.

Thank you for the correction.

My apologies...I misread the city manager's email to me regarding the deed restriction. He stated that it was preventing Safeway from building their grocery store at this site. This statement followed his answer to my question about adherence to the IDPD, so I erroneously assumed the deed restriction was tied that plan.

No problem. We're all struggling to make sense of what it going on.

I would prefer a different grocer than Safeway because they generally don't offer the organic selection I am looking for. However, if everything else you stated was followed, I would be more or less comfortable with it as long as the footprint of the store wasn't 60,000 sq. ft.

Phil, the answer is yes to all of the above. Less the gas station. Please.
Also, its not a notion of Safeway, it IS Safeway. Prettied up or not.
Many other corporate chains already have a history of building with rooftop or underground parking. Examples are: Oakland WholeFoods, SF Wholefoods and SF Northbeach Trader Joes, Berkeley Trader Joes, Berkeley Bowl West (BBW-small lots and underground parking). They also have better customer service, fair trade and organics (TJS' not so much), smaller foot prints though BBW is very large but its in a semi industrial area that was formerly a concrete wasteland. BBW has been a major boon to the West Berkeley neighborhood. I rented my WB condo out in less than 2 hours. ;>)

Phil,
It would certainly be fine with me. All this speculation shows that we are once again losing transparency. Perhaps the plan is exactly as you just stated. We don't know. I know the council can't reveal items that are involving negotiations and specific dollar amounts. But if this plan is going to come before the Planning commission we'd better take a look at it while its in the planning stages. As I stated earlier, its not as if development is not going to occur. Its going to happen eventually, whether we like it or not. The question is can we control the quality of what is built and provide our input? The same is true of the Waterfront. That land is not going to lie fallow indefinitely. But filling it in with more townhouses when the opportunity to do something special that would benefit the region is there and it would be criminal if the council walks away from it. There was a good quote from Jerry Brown in today's paper. We need to do what he stated, some decisions are tough but we mustn't lose vision. We lose vision, we lose the opportunity to effect the kinds of changes we hope to see.

Yeah, I'm not impressed with that design. I doubt Safeway architects have the intention of designing a store that truly compliments the revivalist architecture of our neighborhood.

Thanks for posting this Hector. I have seen this design and visited this site many times in the past.
That design is very "post industrial" and incongruous with the style of the adjoining neighborhood which is popular and expensive because of its arts and crafts style homes. The design does not complement the brick facades of the local businesses and Victorian revival storefronts with wonderful clear story windows.
This design is a radical departure from the design elements that create a "historic" town center for Hercules. It would be better suited to Emeryville, with its post modern lofts and big box mecca.

I don't expect a design that complements the neighboring buildings without a struggle; my experience has been that corporate retailers have a prototype store that is analyzed and tested to maximize sales and are extremely reluctant to deviate from their established formula. Any change to that formula risks building a store that will not generate the expected sales. In most instances, the architect is only able to make cosmetic changes to the exterior of the prototype to fit the unique physical constraints of the individual site. That's why every Best Buy store looks the same, no matter what part of the country you are in. The community has to insist on a site specific solution as the neighbors in Rockridge have been demanding.

Well said, Hector. Safeway has a template store that they try to use every time they build a new store and are reluctant to alter it because of the expense involved. I don't expect they care to design a store (and the other buildings they hope to construct) that is compatible with our neighborhood. We need to remain vigilant.

There is a Lucky Store down in the south bay. I can't recall which town. Though it is not Safeway it is an example of how a chain like Safeway's can adjust to fit. It has rooftop parking and does not take up valuable land for parking. The property has other attached retail. The facade is designed in a way that would resemble what would fit in Hercules. Their is short term curb loading spaces for those that need it.
The ability for Safeway to do this right exist. The city just needs to negotiate to make it right.