Beside the Point

Who's playing the numbers tonight?

If anyone was running a racket last weekend, it was the KXAN Channel 36 news crew. Shoring up his hustle on the eve of Saturday's Arms Around Northcross protest, talking head Chris Willis had Brewster McCracken wax Wal-Mart for the cameras. Never one not to iterate a talking point within an inch of its rhetorical existence, McCracken rolled out a doozy, destined for stuffing and mounting on his buckling sound-bite trophy shelf: that the Northcross supercenter would be not only the largest Wal-Mart in Central Texas (or, as he had previously branded on our brains, the biggest store around these parts period, following IKEA) but "would be the largest Wal-Mart in the entire world," nonpareil.

At which point our omniscient narrator interjects, "Wait a minute, back that up," before rewinding the tape, chipmunk-exorcism vox intact, and replaying McCracken's claim. (Unfortunately, the priceless clip is no longer on KXAN's Web site; surely the Institute of Radio, Television, and Film beckoned.) Saying KXAN "checked city records," Willis claimed five CenTex Wal-Marts were all larger than what's proposed at Northcross.

But according to the city, the station (surprise) didn't check very well. Austin Police Department provided the city with square-footage numbers as part of a Wal-Mart crime-statistics package. The proposed Northcross Wal-Mart, with two stories and a garden center, would be 225,085 square feet. Next-closest of the six provided stores is the 183 store on Norwood Park, at 223,233 square feet; the Ben White locale clocks in at a mere 206,359 square feet.

So KXAN was wrong in downplaying the size of the Northcross tract. Was McCracken right in his Guinness Book claims? It appears not. While a 300,000-square-foot behemoth in Hawaii will forever be the hoary rumor that got away (the store being some unholy hybrid of a supercenter and a Sam's Club – try living next to that thing), several Wal-Mart profiles describe their supercenters growing as large as 261,000 square feet. Conceding he may have gotten the level of comparison wrong, McCracken still says, "It is definitely the largest Wal-Mart in Central Texas."

But post-protest, with the 60-day development moratorium in the Dumpster, is it full speed ahead for the hypermart? McCracken saw revised site plans after running into Lincoln Property and Wal-Mart reps outside of Jo's Coffee by City Hall (they were no doubt marveling at the profit margins along Second Street; if only Wal-Mart had Eames lounge chairs stacked high and priced low). He reports that aside from some additional landscaping and revised street systems ("all positive things"), the design is fundamentally unchanged.

With meetings between Responsible Growth for Northcross, Lincoln, and the city – plus Wal-Mart's own hokey "town hall" hoedown scheduled for March 5 – bulldozers won't likely roll for a little while; failing that, RG4N still has the option of a lawsuit. But McCracken is hopeful. "A protest of 2,500 private citizens is unprecedented" for a local issue, he said, describing the rally's importance as "difficult to overstate." Well, if anyone could …

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Boxing Day

A welter of items awaits council today (Thursday), its first meeting in weeks with a full quorum. Council members will need it, too, as a proposed zoning change to the Town Lake Hyatt Regency will require a supermajority of six votes, the plan having come under fire from other developers as bad design. (The city has so far responded with a hearty shrug.) The platinum development procession cuts an extra-wide swath this week, with the proposed 400-foot Seventh and Rio Grande condo tower and dense mixed-use zoning for the I-35 Concordia campus both coming before the council, along with public hearings and possible action on the vertical-mixed-use opt-in/opt-out process and – finally – the revised Big Box Ordinance. Green dreams round out the rest of the agenda, with the mayor's massive climate protection program and McCracken's marriage of UT's Clean Energy Incubator program with the utility both taking the stage. It's the first program of its kind … in the entire world!

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For more on the ongoing Northcross Wal-mart scandal, see "Developing Stories," as well as the public debate at Chronic, www.austinchronicle.com/chronic.