Residents in Beaverton, Oregon are as determined as ever that Wal-Mart will not gnaw its way into Beaverton — and hope to beat them just like they did once before. Here’s an update received this week from local Wal-Mart opponents: “The application for the Cedar Mill Wal-Mart is stuck in an incompleteness phase, while the developer scrambles to correct deficiencies. A revised traffic impact study is expected. Meanwhile, the 1500+ members of Save Cedar Mill are working diligently to ensure the proposal meets the same fate as another Wal-Mart proposed for Beaverton in 1995-96. The City of Beaverton denied Wal-Mart’s application 10 years ago based on concerns about the downtown impact, traffic, and Wal-Mart’s “transit-unfriendly” business model. The proposed Cedar Mill Wal-Mart site bears uncanny similarities to the 1995-96 site. The traffic burden from the
Cedar Mill Wal-Mart would require expanding the Barnes Road/Cedar Hills Boulevard intersection into a giant intersection eight lanes wide on one leg and seven lanes wide on another. The Cedar Mill site is about the same distance from downtown Beaverton and the same distance from a light rail transit station. The Cedar Mill
site is zoned Transit Oriented Retail Commercial, yet Wal-Mart’s initial application did not indicate how
the proposed store would be more “transit-friendly” than 10 years ago.
For earlier stories about Beaverton, search Newsflash by the name of the town. For related regional stories, search by “Oregon.”
