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The developers of the project on U.S. 19 say they are talking to other "national retailers'' about the site now that Wal-Mart is out.
By BRIDGET HALL GRUMET
© St. Petersburg Times, published August 10, 2001
CRYSTAL RIVER -- Wal-Mart may have lost interest in the site, but a South Carolina company is still proposing to build a giant retail center on U.S. 19 across from Home Depot.
"We're still planning on developing the site," said Robert Smith, regional partner with Realti Corp., a holding company with a long-term option on the site. "We're talking to many different tenants."
Smith would not name any of the "national retailers" who are possible tenants, but said on Thursday that it is unlikely that Wal-Mart would be one of them. Last year Wal-Mart made preliminary inquiries into opening a supercenter on the 32-acre site, but Smith said "I do not think they are interested" anymore.
Contrary to published reports, Smith said, Wal-Mart never signed a contract to build a supercenter on the site.
"They were just looking," he said.
It is unclear why Wal-Mart's interest in the site dropped off. Smith said he did not know Wal-Mart's reasons, and Wal-Mart attorney Bryan Sykes did not return a call for comment Thursday.
Realti Corp.'s plans to build a 226,000-square-foot retail center, flanked by two smaller stores, stalled in January when the state refused to install a traffic signal for the project at U.S. 19 and W Penn Drive, a block south of an existing signal at U.S. 19 and W Venable Street.
Without its own traffic signal, Realti Corp. had to scale back its plans to about 200,000 square feet of commercial space and propose widening W Venable Street to handle the shopping center's traffic, Smith said.
Realti Corp. will submit those revised plans to the county in the next 60 to 90 days, he said.
The plans would need two layers of County Commission approval. Part of the site, 11.83 acres, would need to be rezoned from residential to commercial, and commissioners would have to approve a "planned development overlay," a kind of master plan showing how the site would be built out.
The Realti Corp. property is the second west side site that has fallen through for Wal-Mart.
Faced with a critical report from the state Department of Community Affairs, the retail giant withdrew its application last summer to build a 281,000-square-foot supercenter on 37 acres of environmentally sensitive land just north of Scotty's on U.S. 19.
Heritage Development Co., the Cleveland company that owns the site, now proposes to build three smaller commercial buildings on the site, totaling 189,256 square feet. That plan will come before the Planning and Development Review Board next week, followed by County Commission review.
Vacant sites abound farther south on U.S. 19, but a Wal-Mart supercenter would not fit on any of them without rezoning some of the land to commercial and possibly impacting wetlands.
Billy Mitchell, a Crystal River resident who has fought Wal-Mart's efforts to build a supercenter on U.S. 19, said the mega-retailer needs to find a more appropriate place to build a store.
"All we're doing is chipping away and chipping away at the wetlands," he said.