For a third time, the Springfield Planning and Zoning Commission recommended a developer be denied an application to put drive-thru lanes on a piece of commercial property at the southeast corner of Sunshine Street and South Jefferson Avenue.
Reding Management took another run at getting a conditional use permit for a drive-thru 7 Brew Coffee shop with a proposal to build Springfield’s fourth 7 Brew franchise store.
The commission first recommended denial of a permit for a drive-thru business on March 10. The Springfield City Council sent the proposal back to the Planning and Zoning Commission on April 4, asking the commission to sift through some changes the developer made to the proposal with more trees to buffer the business from neighboring houses. On June 16, the commission again voted to recommend denial of the permit.
This time around, the Planning and Zoning Commission also recommended denial of a conditional use permit for drive-thru lanes by a 1-5 vote. Britton Jobe was the only commissioner to vote for the proposal that was presented and debated on Oct. 6. City staffers recommended approval.
Jobe said he was sensitive to the concerns that neighbors of University Heights, Holland and Seminole brought forward, but that he believes commercial buildout along Sunshine Street is inevitable.
“Sunshine is an extremely traveled street; it is next to one of the heaviest trafficked intersections in our city,” Jobe said. “To say that a drive-thru coffee establishment is inappropriate on Sunshine between Campbell Avenue and National, to me, is ridiculous.”
The drive-thru coffee shop may not get built this time, Jobe said, but he feels Sunshine Street will continue to develop as a commercial corridor in spite of the neighboring residents’ desire to live in a quiet residential neighborhood.
“Neighborhood scale without the types of exceptions of the nature of this conditional use permit will not be economically feasible,” Jobe said. “I think we are just kicking the can down the road.”
Natalie Broekhoven, Bruce Colony, Carl Knuckles, Chris Lebeck and Eric Pauly all voted against the proposed conditional use permit.
Why they recommended denial
Civil engineer Chris Wynn of Springfield-based CJW Transportation Consultants spoke to the Planning and Zoning Commission on Reding’s behalf on Oct. 6.
“Sunshine Street is one of the busiest corridors in the city of Springfield,” Wynn said. “The city comprehensive plan designates the busy intersections for commercial uses. You know, to us, it’s a good fit.”
Wynn said the developer went back to the University Heights community and tried to meet with the neighbors about their traffic and noise concerns, and tried to re-tool the proposal for the 7 Brew drive-thru to make the store “more palatable” for the neighborhood.
Knuckles asked Wynn why Reding and his partners would come back to the Planning and Zoning Commission and the City Council with a 7 Brew Coffee shop proposal after the City Council shot it down with a 1-8 vote in July.
“What were the thoughts in bringing a new CUP forward to again address the drive-thru surface?” Knuckles asked.
University Heights Neighborhood Association president Jan Peterson said concerns about traffic, a location directly across from an elementary school and the proposed coffee shop’s close location to houses on narrow streets are all the same as they have been since the developer first floated the idea of a 7 Brew store at Sunshine and Jefferson.
“All three times, very little about this proposal has changed, and therefore, our objections have changed very little,” Peterson said. “This, to us, feels like the wrong place for what is no doubt a very successful business plan, but just not a good fit for this area.”
The 7 Brew Coffee 500 on Sunshine Speedway?
Lebeck noted part of 7 Brew’s business model is to create three different drive-thru lanes on its properties, allowing more drivers to purchase drinks at the same time. The lot, according to schematics presented to the commission, could hold 26 vehicles at a time, with cars funneling back down to one lane upon exit.
“We have a business that’s going to potentially stack 26 cars at a time in what looks like NASCAR, we’ve got three cars wide next to a drive-thru coffee shop,” Lebeck said. “Is there a belief that this is not going to have an impact on Jefferson and Roanoke?”
There has not been a traffic count done for South Roanoke Avenue. Springfield planning department workers did a traffic count from 5 a.m.-10 p.m. one day at an existing 7 Brew Coffee franchise in Springfield. They counted 776 trips in and out of the site that day, and found the peak traffic hours were between 9 a.m. and noon.
City staff members reported there is “plenty of capacity” at the intersection of Jefferson Avenue and Sunshine Street to handle the traffic that the drive-thru coffee shop would generate, and with some minor adjustments to the stoplights at the intersection, traffic would move with no additional hindrance to drivers.
The only differences between the October proposal and the spring 2022 proposal were the shop’s hours of operation and the volume of the music coming from speakers on the outside of the building, with the developer pledging that the speakers would be pointed away from the neighboring houses to the south of the lot.
Lebeck didn’t feel the developer addressed any concerns about traffic safety that had been brought up at previous meetings.
Broekhoven equated the return of the 7 Brew Coffee proposal as a child being made to eat vegetables “pushing peas around a plate” in the hope that they would somehow be excused from the dinner table.
“It is such a mismatch with our comprehensive master plan and the goals of the planning department in Springfield,” Broekhoven said. “I feel more like this is city staff trying to accommodate a developer with an ill-fitting intensity and redress it a few times to make it an acceptable solution, but the intensity is too high for a residential area, period.”
Colony joined Lebeck and other commissioners with concerns about traffic safety that the coffee shop could create.
“It does not appear that they’ve made any attempt to modify their business plan to be anything other than a high volume drive-thru with an entry and exit onto Jefferson and an entry onto Roanoke,” Colony said.
Colony wondered aloud if people who got a cup of coffee would want to turn back north from the coffee shop onto Jefferson Avenue and potentially deal with a long line of cars wanting to turn onto Sunshine from Jefferson, or if the average coffee drinker would try to skirt traffic and exit east onto Roanoke Avenue.
“All of the cars that are coming out of there that don’t want to turn back onto Sunshine, and would prefer to drive through the neighborhood to find a way out are still going to be driving down a small collector street with no sidewalks, no gutters — I mean, those are still gravel driveways on that road,” Colony said. “I still think this is a bad idea.”
About 7 Brew and Reding Management
7 Brew Coffee is based in Arkansas, and most of its 22 stores are owned by franchisees. According to its website, 7 Brew was “born from a desire to change drive-thru coffee into a fun, mind-blowing experience for everyone.” It serves coffee, sodas, smoothies, shakes and energy drinks.
Reding Management owns a total of 1.08 acres of land on the southeast corner of Sunshine and Jefferson. The property sits across Jefferson Avenue from Jefferson Avenue Baptist Church, and across Sunshine Street from Sunshine Elementary School.
As it stands, a developer could build a coffee shop with a driveway off Jefferson Avenue, but they can’t legally operate a drive-thru window.
Springfield ordinance allows a rezoning request or a permit request to be denied if the proposed use is found to have “a detritus impact on the health, safety and welfare of the public,” or if the use would cause “potentially adverse effects upon the community or other people within its vicinity.” By law, the procedure for finding these determinations is discretionary.
7 Brew Coffee represents the first phase of the Reding Management development. In the second phase, Reding Management razed two houses on Sunshine Street and plans to build some type of commercial building or buildings where they stood. In the second phase, the developer would build a driveway from the property onto Roanoke Avenue. There are no plans for the coffee shop to have a driveway on Sunshine Street.
“We believe this is an appropriate use for an undeveloped corner of a primary arterial,” Reding wrote. “We also would like to point out that the lot has remained undeveloped under current zoning for nearly 40 years.”
Reding is a former campaign manager and then congressional staffer for U.S. Rep. Billy Long, R-Missouri. Along with James Nevins, Reding is one of the founders of Nevont, a human resources and benefits firm founded in Springfield in 2018.
