Costco's rejected Pompano store goes before commissioners July 28

Pompano Beach city commissioners will hear an appeal on July 28 of the planning board’s refusal to approve a Costco Wholesale store inside the Live! Pompano Planned Commercial Development, the retail piece of the 223-acre former Pompano Park racetrack redevelopment. The item lands on the commission agenda as file 26-469, an appeal of a development order denying the major site plan application.

Why it matters

This is the entitlement risk every master-plan developer underwrites and almost nobody prices correctly. The Pomp already has its planned development approval. What it did not have was a guarantee that an individual site plan inside that envelope would clear a seven-member advisory board on a given Wednesday. The board voted 4-3 in June to deny, and a single vote is now the difference between a signed anchor and a hole in the merchandising plan.

For anyone assembling a large mixed-use site in Broward, the lesson is about sequencing. A big-box anchor is the tenant that de-risks the retail component for lenders, and it is also the tenant most likely to draw organized neighborhood opposition over traffic, noise and fuel stations. Winning the master plan and then losing the anchor is the worst order to lose in, because the pro forma was already built on the anchor.

The numbers

The proposal is a 163,084-square-foot Costco Wholesale facility on roughly 18.7 acres at the northwest corner of the Live! Pompano Planned Commercial Development. The planning board, sitting as the local planning agency, voted 4-3 on June 18 to deny the major site plan. The appeal goes to the city commission on July 28.

What’s next

Commissioners can uphold the denial, overturn it, or send the plan back with conditions. Watch for conditions on access, hours and the fuel component, because that is where a rescue usually gets negotiated. Also watch how a denial here reprices the rest of the Pomp’s retail, since an anchor pulled out of a master plan leaves a very specific kind of vacancy behind. More South Florida coverage.