The City Council returned this week to an issue it wrestled with once before: The opening of “formula stores” in the downtown shopping area. Skip Brand of Healdsburg Running Company and Merete Wimmer of Rete, among others, raised alarms last summer about the lease of a storefront at 326 Healdsburg Ave. to a national men’s clothing store brand, Faherty.
Their complaints reached the council on Aug. 19, and they turned it over to the Planning Department to figure out how to deal with it.
Monday night that issue returned to the council with a report from the senior planner, Ellen McDowell, augmented by additional input from the community. Her solution: Expand the zone wherein formula stores are prohibited, from just around the Plaza to almost seven full city blocks, from the roundabout to North Street, from Foss Creek to East Street.
The weight of the largely positive public comment, however, was to further refine those borders around the edges, to make this expanded definition of downtown something that everyone could agree on.
Behind the Open Door
In the meantime, Faherty opened its store in the former Ooh La Luxe space, a roomy but narrow showplace for the upscale beach fashion Faherty is known for. It opened on Nov. 3, just one month ago, and while a robust “grand opening” was originally planned, it didn’t happen.
“We did more of a soft one, and then kind of just rolled right into shopping season,” said Iyayi Onaghinor, the local store manager. The shop is filled with high-quality clothing, not inexpensive, and more stylish than one might find at another men’s store in town.
“It gives off, like, a beach feel and a beach vibe to it when you walk into the store, but there’s more of a dressier look to it,” he said. “And then for our women’s wear, like a whole range of sweaters, blazers, dresses …” Elsewhere in the shop were the odd illustrated book, colorful ski caps or “beanies” and a brown bear climbing the wall in the back room.
All in all, it’s not that dissimilar from other stores in town, aside from the bear, and shopping is by its very nature a competitive enterprise. But the issue is not that the items being sold are inappropriate or wrong for Healdsburg—though Skip Brand did say, “It’s surf wear. We don’t even have a beach.”
Rather, the issue is that Faherty is a multi-million-dollar chain, with some 60 stores nationwide. In other words, it’s not local, and the local business community for the most part likes to keep the shopping experience in Healdsburg local. And by its very scale, it poses a threat to smaller businesses in town, whose pockets are not as deep.
Formula for Business
Healdsburg does have a limited prohibition against what are called “formula” stores, and prescriptions on “big box” stores and franchises as well. When Faherty was allowed to move in just steps from the Plaza, store owners complained that it opened the door to an entirely different shopping experience.
Basically, a formula store is: “A business that is required by contractual or other arrangement to maintain any of the following: standardized services, menu, decor, uniforms, architecture, signs or other similar features and is not part of a locally- or regionally-based group of businesses.” That’s the city’s present definition, and while the proposed definition is not that dissimilar, many of the terms are further described to prevent any ambiguity.
This week’s meeting, and McDowell’s presentation, was the planning department’s attempt to codify any ambiguities in the city’s ordinances, sync them with the General Plan, and, per the community and council’s request, expand the downtown area where formula stores are prohibited. (Faherty will stay, regardless, as it has a lease and would be “grandfathered” into any changes in city code.)
The ambiguity starts with the definition of what a formula store is, and what big box retail and outlet malls are, for that matter (both of which are prohibited in Healdsburg according to the General Plan). The definitions in the municipal code were not fully clear, so much of McDowell’s presentation was crafting bomb-proof definitions of the terms that would withstand legal scrutiny and avoid confusion in the permitting process.
Repeat?
Oddly, the city and its planning department went through this very same process in 2011, and crafted an ordinance to clarify these business types. But although the ordinance was prepared by the Planning Commission and sent to the council for approval, it was never passed and never implemented. Its fate is unknown.
As complex (or nerdy) as the definitions were, most of the discussion circled around the area McDowell identified as “formula-free zones.” At present only businesses facing the Plaza, on the four streets that surround it, are prevented from fitting the formula model. That’s why Faherty could open at 356 Healdsburg Ave., three doors away from the Plaza.
The new proposal was to expand the formula-free zone one block further into the Downtown Commercial district. McDowell showed a map where a red line marked the border of the proposed formula-free zone; it surrounds most of seven city blocks adjacent to the Plaza, marking a significant expansion of the prohibition zone.
Her map showed that “the parcels located within the Plaza Retail and Downtown Commercial districts south of North Street were appropriate in meeting the intent of the General Plan to regulate formula businesses around the Plaza.”
Both Sides Now
When the presentation went to public comment, several people were quick to point out that if the formula-free zone is relegated to the south (downtown) side of North Street, it would create an artificial and perhaps unworkable contrast down the middle of the street. Others pointed out that the downtown character of Healdsburg followed Healdsburg Avenue north past North Street, all the way to Piper.
McDowell admitted that North Street seemed logical as a boundary, though she hadn’t specifically called out “both sides of North Street” in her proposal. The council agreed that both sides of North Street should be formula-free, from East Street all the way down to Grove—a stretch to include SingleThread, the Raven Theater, Fideaux’s and Little Saint among other businesses.
But the call to add a corridor of Healdsburg Avenue all the way to Piper Street was narrowly eliminated by the three most business-oriented council members, Ron Edwards, Evelyn Mitchell and David Hagele.
Rather than battle over the lines being drawn and what exact legal terminology would work best, City Manager Jeff Kay suggested the next step for the process would be to send it to the Planning Commission for its input and a draft—at which point it would come back to the City Council for a final vote.
Ironically, that’s the same process that led to the disappearance of the 2011 effort to define formula businesses out of Healdsburg’s downtown area—a “lost in the mail” scenario that one can only hope will not be repeated in 2024.
