Wal-Mart Supercenter Halted for Now, Court Date Set for November

Mark your calendar for November 13, 2007. That's the date scheduled by RG4N, the City of Austin, and Lincoln Property Company for a bench trial regarding the Northcross Mall lawsuit.

Lincoln has also agreed to not begin any exterior building demolition in the area designated for the planned Wal-Mart Supercenter prior to November 20, 2007.

Under a separate agreement, RG4N will consolidate its lawsuit with the Allandale Neighborhood Association, which also sued the City of Austin and Lincoln over traffic concerns.

If RG4N wins in court on any one of the four claims described below, the entire site plan and all the current development activity at Northcross would be declared invalid. Lincoln would then be required to stop work at the site and seek approval of a new plan, which would be subject to several regulations that did not apply to the current plan. As a result of the new regulations, any new site plan would be unlikely to include a Supercenter and would more closely resemble the type of redevelopment the neighborhoods desire.

RG4N's lawsuit claims that in approving Lincoln's site plan, the City failed to follow the law in the following four areas:

• The City failed to enforce a subdivision plat note which protects Shoal Creek from flooding and pollution
• The City failed to enforce the City tree ordinance, thereby illegally permitting destruction of 29 large, mature trees on the Northcross property
• The City failed to follow traffic and public safety provisions of the law, thereby endangering public safety and overburdening the street system, increasing risk of traffic accidents, increasing ozone pollution levels, and reducing emergency vehicle response times
• The City failed to follow the required process for approving a site plan that involves a garden center. The correct process would have required Lincoln to get a conditional use permit from the city's Zoning and Platting Commission and to seek approval from City Council.