Demolition makes way for new CVS store in Sebastopol

Work crews this week began razing Sebastopol's long-shuttered Pellini Chevrolet dealership in order to make room for construction of a controversial new CVS store on a prominent downtown corner.

The noisy demolition is the first visible movement on the disputed project, which had been stalled for several years by public resistance and litigation over traffic impacts and the adequacy of the environmental review.

But under a legal settlement reached in October 2014, the city earlier this month issued a building permit and other entitlements authorizing work to commence on the property at Highway 12 and Petaluma Avenue.

“Most everyone in town is really grateful that the CVS eyesore will be gone,” Mayor Sarah Glade Gurney said Thursday. “They've owned this property for three and a half years, and we've suffered their chain-link fence, and their boarded-up windows and the weeds.”

The demolition work marks the closure of a bitter chapter in city politics that helped frame future conversations over city planning, downtown business development and allowances for chain stores and other formula business operations.

Opposition to the proposed store proved the defining issue in City Council elections four years ago and echoed again in the fall 2014 election.

The roughly 18,600-square-foot store may always be a reminder of that time, at least for current Sebastopol residents, but at this point the project appears to be going full speed ahead.

Asbestos remediation in some of the buildings was begun last week, and two of four buildings already have been all or partly torn down. The lot is scheduled to be cleared and ready for grading in about a month, according to project superintendent Ren Bruns, with Rocklin-based Stuart James Construction.

Buildings should begin to take shape in about two months, he said, and the project should be finished around September, project manager Katie Cull said.

“It will definitely be a nice finished product when we are all out of there,” Cull said.

The Chevy dealership had beckoned car buyers to the nearly 2½-acre site at the gateway to town from 1932, when Angelo “Pete” Pellini first opened its doors, until 2008, when his grandson closed the business.

In 2010, Sacramento- based Armstrong Development proposed a new retail project on the site that would include a CVS store and a JP Morgan Chase Bank branch. Chase has since backed out.

But questions and concerns about the proposal quickly materialized, focused on the potential for traffic congestion at what already is a busy, complicated series of intersections linking two state highways with arterial city streets.

Critics also protested turning such a prominent corner over to a cookie-cutter chain store that city officials said made some grudging concessions but resisted compromise that would have made the design and signage more acceptable to local interests.

A local citizens group, Small Town Sebastopol, sued CVS and the city over failure to complete a full-scale environmental impact report on the project. The city also was sued by CVS when it approved a moratorium on drive- thrus. The initial Armstrong Development proposal included drive-up windows both at the bank and the drug store.

Under a settlement negotiated in October 2014, developers dispensed with the drive-thrus and backed off plans to allow left turns out of the property onto adjacent streets, in addition to making design concessions.

The settlement also obligated CVS to pay $45,000 to fund a traffic signal synchronization study and an additional $105,000 to cover Small Town Sebastopol's legal fees, with whatever remainder was left over to go toward still-undetermined traffic mitigation efforts in the city. The final payment is pending completion of paperwork, City Manager Larry McLaughlin said.

The city sought settlement in the case in part because it already had spent more than $336,000 on litigation over the project.

In the meantime, Gurney said there appear to be fewer people shopping at the current CVS store on Gravenstein Highway North.

“I think the community's moved on,” she said. “... It's much emptier than it used to be.”

You can reach Staff Writer Mary Callahan at 521-5249 or mary.callahan@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @MaryCallahanB.