10.5.22 Planning Board Minutes - Laserfiche WebLink

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Approved 12.7.22 441 significant amount of studies to understand what kind of business they are going to do here. They are not frivolous in 442 what they do when they invest money into a site like this and this is one that they've looked at for some time. The Dollar 443 General does do a decent amount of business. They would serve to some competitiveness with them to keep everybody 444 working hard. It offers jobs in that area which is a very rural area. I understand it is retail there is not an enormous 445 amount of retail and a limited amount of people in that specific area. If you were to go into a tight circle of it, it services a 446 much larger rural area,the people are driving in and around to and from all over the place and the traffic does play a big 447 role into as well. I just wanted to offer that up as to why our client is considering this a site. There are some limited 448 resources up there for shopping and this would be another one and adding the Dollar Tree portion of it in certainly sets it 449 apart from the gas station and the Dollar General up there by adding another part of it that the area doesn't have and 450 wouldn't have typically because you can't. A standalone Dollar Tree can't survive. 451 452 Delores Bailey: And a market study was done for this? 453 454 Doug Burr: Dollar Tree has 16,000 stores between the 2 of them,they do internal studies that they analyze the entire 455 area, population,traffic that kind of thing and come to the conclusion as to what kind of sales they are going to do. 456 457 Delores Bailey: With the area being so rural, you are telling us that the market study supported it. 458 459 Doug Burr: Yes,supported this store. Supported this store with the Dollar General as well. With the traffic, I might just 460 address that as well. Most communities have a traffic requirement of 4 per 1000 and that is in a market like 461 Hillsborough. If you were to go in for general retail it would be 4 per 1000. On this particular case we are pushing more 462 5 per thousand or something like that to get us to the 53 parking spaces that are there so even in a market like this that 463 would have much higher traffic, of people coming through, on a store like this generally somewhat between 32 and 40 464 parking spaces is about what we would need given the traffic we might expect and usually that comes at Christmas time 465 it's not even at a normal shopping dates. Up in this particular area we are going to far exceed what we would need if we 466 were to go into a community as dense as where we are right now so the 53 parking spaces far exceeds what we typically 467 would need pretty much anywhere and how they operate. Usually we go with the extra ones because it's a requirement 468 of the area or code but generally speaking somewhere between 32 and 40 is what we usually are going for with this 469 client. 470 471 Randy Marshall: You are essentially counting on out of county customers or commuters to build your customer base to 472 make this a viable business because everyone seems to agree there is not sufficient residents within the circle around 473 the business to make it viable, is that correct? 474 475 Doug Burr: I would say that certainly plays a part of it. The other thing that happens is when you get into a rural area 476 like this generally you look at a 5 mile radius for this particular client as to how many people are there. When then look 477 at these rural areas and they've done many of them,they are looking at a much bigger circle, say 15, 20 miles. What 478 that will bring in is commuters coming back and the traffic that is actually going back and forth. I'm sure there is a lot of 479 people that might live up there that work down in Hillsborough or other place but traffic would play a role in that and draw 480 from a much larger area for people's daily needs rather than driving here or driving someplace else. 481 482 Randy Marshall: My point being if we are pulling in out of county customers,we're pulling in tax dollars to the Orange 483 County tax base that would not have been available otherwise. 484 485 Doug Burr: That's a good point. 486 487 Beth Bronson: Is there a plan to add groceries? 488 489 Doug Burr: They do have groceries but as far as fresh produce,they don't do that if that's what you're asking. They do 490 have a grocery component including freezers and coolers that would carry milk, eggs, and those types of things. It 491 would be somewhat limited by the nature of what they do. This store is going to offer the same things they would offer in 492 any other store. 493 494 Beth Bronson: Do they ever use local vendors? 495