City’s weird war against Safeway

The Petaluma City Council will hold its annual goal-setting session this weekend, and the expectation is that council members will set priorities on important things like fixing the city’s dilapidated street system and getting the long-awaited Rainier interchange built.|

The Petaluma City Council will hold its annual goal-setting session this weekend, and the expectation is that council members will set priorities on important things like fixing the city’s dilapidated street system and getting the long-awaited Rainier interchange built. One dubious goal the council can eliminate from its list is wasting any more staff time trying to prevent Safeway from building a gas station alongside its store on McDowell Boulevard.

In 2013, the grocery store chain submitted an application to construct a large fueling station which, according to the city’s existing zoning ordinance, is a permitted use. At the request of city planners, the store subsequently produced a variety of required documents, including a noise study, traffic study and an air quality/greenhouse gas study, all of which showed that the project would create minimal impacts.

Public opposition to the project was negligible. The only real objections came from a handful of competing gas station owners who didn’t want the competition from Safeway which has an attractive rewards program offering gas discounts for grocery shoppers.

City Councilman Mike Healy, who heard about a lawsuit filed against Safeway alleging it had illegally undercut its gas station competitors in the city of Dixon, took up the fight on the unusual premise that the city should preemptively thwart a potential anti-trust problem. According to Healy, the Safeway gas discount program, if unleashed on unsuspecting local consumers, would cause “urban blight.” This would come about, he predicted, because other gas stations would go out of business in the face of Safeway’s lower gas prices.

Despite the lack of facts indicating that any real threat existed, Healy successfully convinced his council colleagues that something must be done to stop Safeway. The strategy: Declare that there is a “current and immediate threat to the public health, safety or welfare” of such substantial magnitude that it required a temporary moratorium on new gas station developments. The temporary ban would give the city time to enact a new zoning law that would permanently prohibit Safeway’s gas station.

Predictably, Safeway objected to the proposed moratorium and made clear it believed its approval would violate a host of state and federal laws. When it became clear to council members that a temporary ban on gas stations would trigger an expensive lawsuit which the city could probably not win, they backed down.

But that was not the end of it. According to a story in today’s Argus-Courier by reporter Ernie Barrera, city officials went on to develop a much more circuitous strategy for defeating Safeway: Increase the fees on new gas station developments by more than 14,000 percent. In the case of the proposed project at hand, the transportation impact fee would skyrocket from $11,858 to $1.7 million, thus making the project entirely unfeasible and creating a de facto ban on all new gas stations in the city.

To the seven city council members who unanimously approved the massive fee increase in July, it probably seemed like a brilliant strategy. Except, of course, that it is probably illegal.

In a 24-page letter to the city, lawyers for Safeway cited eight specific violations of state and federal laws, and have requested that the new ordinance be repealed or that the project be exempt from its dictates.

Either that, or go to court to defend it.

If there was a good reason to fight this costly battle, we could understand. But there isn’t. City officials are not responsible for protecting the profit margins of out-of-town gas station owners from possible unfair price competition. That’s the job of the state legislature and the courts.

Also, with the city desperate for new tax revenues, it makes little sense to reject a few hundred thousand dollars a year in new sales tax revenues from a large grocery store.

Nor is it likely that Petaluma residents want their elected officials working overtime on a pointless battle that would only limit their chances of saving money when filling up at the pump.

The are many important priorities for the city to tackle this year. Devising unusual legal tactics to prevent the Safeway gas station application from proceeding through the regular public approval process is not one of them.

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