Albemarle Walmart set to expand

If all goes as planned, there will soon be a new Walmart Supercenter in Albemarle County.
The Walmart at the corner of U.S. 29 and Hilton Heights Road is scheduled to receive a facelift and grow by about 30 percent.
“Sometime by the end of the month, we should be ready to get things under way,” said Keith Morris, Walmart spokesman for the Mid-Atlantic Region.
Gerald Gatobu, principal planner for the county, said the local Walmart has received approval for a 35,000-square-foot expansion and company officials appear “itching” to start construction.

Morris estimates that the Walmart addition will be complete by fall 2010. Walmart plans to use the expansion mostly to sell more groceries, but there will also be major changes within the existing structure.
Walmart plans to “expand the aisles and open the departments up so they’re easier to navigate, easier to access,” Morris said. “It’s a very successful location, but anyone who’s been in there in recent past, especially on a busy weekend, knows that it’s very overcrowded.”
The addition on the side of the Walmart building would face Jim Price Chevrolet and make the building 154,789 square feet.

Walmart also plans to make improvements to the parking lot, including a reconfiguration of parking spaces and the addition of new lights and a bus stop. Inside, the electronics and apparel departments will probably be enlarged, Morris said, which means more merchandise would be offered.
The new building’s size will be about average among Walmart Supercenters, considering that many Supercenters are about 180,000 square feet, while others are closer to 120,000 square feet, Morris said.

Gatobu said that he hasn’t heard any complaints about the Walmart expansion from nearby businesses or residents. Walmart already owns enough land to expand, and the expansion complies with all zoning codes, he said. The site development plan was submitted to the county in April and approved in September.
There will also be some renovations.
“We want all of our stores to be the best examples of what the company has to offer,” Morris said, explaining that Walmart doesn’t want any older stores to misrepresent the company’s “brand identity.”
“And this is an example of that,” Morris said. “The store’s been around since the early ’90s. I think ’92, ’93, the store first opened.”
Local developer Wendell Wood, president of United Land Corp., said in an interview two months ago that Walmart had plans a few years ago to build a 222,000-square-foot Supercenter at a site about a mile from the existing Walmart.

However, that plan didn’t pan out, according to some county officials, largely because some county heads didn’t want a massive store on land zoned “rural” — despite Wood saying he’d be willing to give the county several millions of dollars in proffers, as well as free land.
Wood said in a recent interview that he doesn’t suspect the addition to the existing Walmart would prevent company officials from building a new, much larger Walmart nearby, if the county were to approve. As for the existing building, Wood said that he has talked with leaders of a separate company that would be willing to buy the expanded Walmart “in a heart-beat.”

Morris said he wasn’t familiar with Walmart’s negotiations with Wood. However, Morris said it’s difficult to say if, or when, Walmart would attempt to build another store in the county.
“A store like this will be looked at, to determine how successful it becomes over time,” Morris said of the existing Walmart set to become a Supercenter. “And if it warrants maybe another store opportunity further away, that’s a decision we would evaluate much further down the road, as far as time.”