Costco relocation plan on hold in Fresno amid traffic congestion fears. What’s next?

The fate of a proposed new Costco Wholesale membership warehouse store in northwest Fresno could be in doubt after two members of the Fresno City Council expressed concerns about how it could drive traffic congestion for nearby neighborhoods.

The City Council has pushed off a vote to approve the 219,000-square-foot store at Herndon Avenue and Riverside Drive until either Costco’s environmental consultants or the city’s planning and public works departments can provide specific information about reducing the impacts on the surrounding streets and residents.

The site at the northeast corner of the Herndon/Riverside intersection was formerly farmed as a fig orchard for years but has long been vacant. It is diagonally across the intersection from the Marketplace at El Paseo shopping center to the southwest.

The council had been expected to vote on certifying an environmental analysis for the massive store, as well as rezoning the 22.4-acre site and amending the city’s land-use plan from its current “community commercial” zoning —which already would allow for the project — to a more intensive commercial designation to accommodate Costco’s plan to build an automated car wash on the property.

Another component is changing the designation of Herndon Avenue, which runs along the south edge of the property, from an “expressway,” which allows no driveways, side streets or left-turn lanes, to a “super arterial” street between Hayes Avenue and Riverside Drive that would allow for trucks heading east on Herndon to make left turns onto a new private drive about 500 feet east of Riverside.

The Fresno Planning Commission voted 4-0, with two members absent and another abstaining, to recommend that the City Council approve the project.

It’s unclear what the delay imposed Thursday by the City Council might mean to Costco’s development schedule. The new store is proposed to replace the existing Costco store on West Shaw Avenue, about 2 1/2 miles to the southeast. Pari Holliday, Costco’s real estate development director for the project, and real estate consultant Tom Mahoney said the company’s lease for the West Shaw location expires in September 2025.

Costco representatives told the City Council that the old store, which opened in 1985, is too old to continue to serve the company’s needs. The surrounding shopping center also provides no room for expansion

But the company’s representatives told Council President Annalisa Perea that they don’t have a “Plan B” for what Costco would do if the proposal is not approved by the council, whether seeking a lease extension at the Shaw Avenue site, relocating to a nearby city, or other options.

“I don’t know the answer to that because we’ve been just focused on trying to concentrate on this relocation,” Mahoney said. “We’re very focused on staying in the city of Fresno.”

At almost 220,000 square feet, the proposed store has been reduced in size from what was pitched in a draft environmental analysis in July 2023. At that time, the building footprint — including the retail sales floor, warehouse and a planned last-mile “market delivery” center for staging deliveries of bulky items to customers — was billed as more than 241,000 square feet. At that size, the store would be among the biggest in the Costco chain, supplanting what is reportedly the world’s largest Costco in Salt Lake City, Utah, which is about 235,000 square feet.

The new store, however, is in line with Costco’s current prototype, Holliday said. The older store on West Shaw Avenue, by contrast, is about 134,000 square feet.

Traffic is the big concern

The potential for traffic congestion, both from shoppers and delivery trucks, is one of the primary concerns voiced by Councilmembers Mike Karbassi and Miguel Arias. Karbassi’s District 2 encompasses northwest Fresno including the Herndon/Riverside site as well as the existing Shaw Avenue store.

The environmental analysis for the new store forecasts that the store would generate more than 10,600 new vehicle trips on weekdays and more than 14,200 trips on weekend days. Additionally, the analysis states, “Costco anticipates an average of about 10 to 13 trucks delivering goods on a typical weekday,” and two to three trucks each day delivering fuel to a 32-pump gas station.

Costco representatives said they expect all of the company’s trucks coming to and from the site to rely on a new private driveway along the east edge of the property instead of Riverside Drive, presuming changes to Herndon Avenue that would allow eastbound trucks to make left-hand turns to the driveway. Trucks exiting the property onto Herndon would only be able to make right-hand turns to head west.

Other traffic would have access from several different points: three different driveways on the west side of the site off of Riverside Drive, including one at Fir Avenue with new traffic signals; one at the north from Spruce Avenue, which would be extended from where it now dead-ends near Riverside Golf Course; and two on the east side from the new private drive.

Karbassi said one of his priorities is that trucks coming into the site avoid using Riverside Drive, where truck noise could disturb residents in a neighborhood on the west side of the street. But, he added, he’s also concerned about the potential for a significant increase in traffic on Spruce Avenue between Hayes and Polk avenues, creating problems for residents north and east of the proposed store.

“Spruce itself is such a wide road; there’s always the concern of speeding, people revving their cars going through Hayes and Polk, to Hayes,” Karbassi said. He asked Harman Dhaliwal, a manager in the city’s Public Works Department, about measures to calm or slow traffic on Spruce. Dhaliwal said that the new stretch of Spruce Avenue would only be three lanes and 72 feet wide, compared to the wider five-lane footprint to the east.

Dhaliwal said traffic studies have not shown an anticipated problem, but Karbassi was skeptical. If at some future point traffic on Spruce at Hayes increases to a point that justifies a traffic signal where now there is only a two-way stop, “how do we find funding for a new traffic signal because of the impact of this new commercial project?” Karbassi asked. “That’s going to be a very big concern for me.”

Who pays to solve future traffic problems?

“I don’t want to just approve things saying, ‘This is what we think is the minimum, we’re going to do this today,’ and then taxpayers are on the hook five or 10 years from now to pay for upgrades,” Karbassi added. “It’s going to be hard for me to support this without any mitigation or traffic calming in place. … My biggest concern out of everything I’ve read is the impact of traffic flow in the area.”

Arias raised a similar concern, citing “the disaster of Chick-fil-A and In-N-Out” congestion for drive-thru lanes at the two fast-food restaurants in the River Park shopping center at Blackstone and Nees avenues. Arias noted that those two eateries were approved by the city, but “now every time we look to mitigate those traffic congestion matters, we are told that we have to come up with General Fund money to fix them because the developer was not required to make those improvements prior to approval.”

“In this case, I don’t see how a facility of this size and scope … would not trigger additional traffic mitigation,” Arias added. “I’m not ready to vote on this today. There are some grave concerns that I have around the significant traffic impact this is going to generate.”

Thursday’s vote to defer approval of the Costco project did not specify when the city’s planning and public works staff would bring more detailed information on zoning and traffic concerns back to the City Council for potential approval.

Clark noted that the current zoning of the property already allows for large-format retailers such as Costco to build on the site with some particular conditions. But the company’s desire to build a car wash triggered the need for rezoning the property and amending the city’s overall land-use plan.

Could or would Costco consider moving forward without a car wash? Holliday said after the vote that she was not authorized to address that or other questions from reporters.

But Karbassi said after the vote that developing the center without the car wash “is something I think that’s still on the table.”

“I think if there were no car wash, that might be an easier way to queue up the folks that are waiting for the gas station,” he said. “What are alternatives so that traffic doesn’t back up” onto the new private driveway?

“I want Costco to go through. I’m looking for a way to say I approve,” Karbassi added. “But there are residents who are impacted by this who have reasonable questions about noise and traffic, and we have to get them answers before we get to a point where we approve it.”