BEL AIR, Md. — The promise of shopping at a 152-thousand-square Costco warehouse falls on deaf ears here in the Bright Oaks sub-division of Bel Air.
“You talk to anybody on this street or anybody in this neighborhood, you won’t find one person who’ll say that they want it,” said longtime resident Sam Harvin, “You won’t find anybody else, but politicians who say they want it.”
Politicians haven’t said a whole lot about the project since a public hearing last July when many spoke out against the project, and they’re not talking now, but the State Highway Administration asked for more study to address concerns over the impact on traffic along Emmorton and Plumtree Roads, which Costco didn’t seem to balk at.
“They’re legitimate,” Costco Attorney Joseph Snee told WMAR-2 News back in July, “We’re just getting started. I want to emphasize that this process is the first step in a long process and we have a traffic engineer and they are working with the county. The county picks who the engineer is.”
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Almost a decade ago, Walmart planned to build a new store on the same site but those plans fell through.
It, too, had to address the anticipated impact of heavier traffic on existing roads and intersections.
“They already did a traffic study, and it failed. So now, they’re putting in a bigger store, a bigger facility,” said Harvin, “Why wouldn’t that one fail? In other words, why do another one? You just did one three years ago and it failed, and it did not pass the smell test. So now you’re going to build something bigger. How does that pass the smell test?”
The county assured us today that its responsibility is “to ensure that all applicable laws and regulations are followed for this, or any other, proposed development and the Cassilly administration is committed to transparency for all concerned.”
An attorney for Costco has previously said he expected this to be a drawn out process, and even if it’s approved, the new store could be two to three years away.
