Empty spaces, what are we living for

Some of the more interesting tidbits about the City news can often be found in the most unexpected places.   During the Planning Board meeting on Monday night, during the informational run-through of future agenda items, Planning Services Manager Andrew Thomas let drop that an application would be forthcoming about a potential tenant to fill space at South Shore.   The space: the old Borders building.   That news alone is pretty awesome because the space is a fairly large one and given the state of the economy it’s been pretty tough to fill some of the smaller spaces at South Shore let alone the biggest space of them all, the old Borders store.

The potential business is a women’s fitness center/day spa type operation, no names were mentioned and I wasn’t really familiar with any national models for that type of business other than perhaps Curves, which caters specifically to women, but given that Alameda already has a Curves in operation and I don’t think they do the day spa thing, I didn’t think it would be a Curves.   So I did some internet research about possible models and a few popped up.  Such as Total Woman Gym and Spa which appears to be some sort of chain or franchise, but clustered mainly in Southern California.    Then there is Bella Tosca Day Spa, Salon & Fitness Center which seems pretty swanky, but more standalone.  The more I searched the more of these Women Fitness Centers/Spas I uncovered, it is a definitely a business model out there and understandably so.   Not that I go to gyms or exercise or do anything, but I totally get how a traditional gym can be intimidating for a lot of ladies so something like this would probably be welcome for women who prefer not to be next to the guy trying to bench press his body weight.

I’ll just be happy to see South Shore fill out a bit more.   When I tweeted that information yesterday this was the coy response back from  South Shore.

@laurendo Only time will tell! We do love the ladies at South Shore!!!

— Alameda South Shore (@ASouthShoreC) February 14, 2012

But on another retail related topic, remember the whole business about Target and the cap on the amount on non-taxable goods that they could sell?   To nutshell, after a protracted discussion Target agreed to cap non taxable sales (grocery and pharmacy) to under 10% for no more than five years.    The only no vote on that agreement came from Board Member Henneberry, who represents the United Food and Commercial Workers Union (aka grocery union for ease), when he’s not volunteering as a Planning Board Member.   According to the staff report — which I had meant to write about before the meeting, but spaced out — shortly after the Planning Board vote the United Food and Commercial Workers Union appealed the Planning Board decision, and a hearing was scheduled for the City Council.   Since the appeal on January 19 (the PB decision was on January 9) and February 1 the parties (Catellus, Target and the grocery union) all met to hash out an agreement.  Eventually they came to an understand which resulted in an extension of Target agreeing to the cap on non taxable sales from the original five years to 20 years.

I bring this up because of the entity that appealed the Planning Board decision and Board Member Henneberry’s comments during the discussion of this particular item.   I think, in this case, it would have been better for Board Member Henneberry to have recused himself from the either the vote or the discussion and the vote.   Personally think recusal from the vote would have been sufficient since he did bring up some salient points for consideration, but given his role at UFCW and the possible impacts it would have been much cleaner for him to make his points and recuse himself from the vote.  In the past, other PB members have recused themselves for various reasons, and it would have allowed him to not be in conflict given that the ultimate vote was one that would make his membership unhappy to the point of filing an appeal of the decision.   While the parties eventually worked it out offline and amicably, there could be situations when the parties are not so amicable and the conflict could end up being problematic.