Bloomington grants Academy Sports second set of variances, to occupy old Marsh grocery building
Three months ago, Bloomington’s board of zoning appeals (BZA) granted a variance to Academy Sports + Outdoor as part of the Houston-based company’s plan to open a store in the location of the former Marsh Supermarket building on the city’s east side.
Under the terms of that variance, Academy Sports can have 252 parking spaces on the site. The city’s zoning code would ordinarily place a cap of 169 parking spaces for the 51,268-square-foot building.
But it turned out that the relaxing of the parking space maximum was not enough to get the store all the way to the approval of a building permit.
Bloomington’s planning department identified several more issues, many of which were resolved through back-and-forth with Academy Sports. But in the end, there were four unresolved ways that the existing site did not conform with the requirements of the city’s unified development ordinance (UDO).
That meant four more variances were requested by the company, which were in part granted by last Thursday (Dec. 21) by Bloomington’s BZA.
Even though Academy Sports looks to be on a clear path to eventually adding Bloomington to its portfolio of Indiana stores, some frustration surfaced at Thursday’s meeting because of the delayed start.
Three months ago, when the BZA granted the variance on the number of parking spaces, the company had wanted to be open for business at the former Marsh supermarket location by September 2024.
Under the terms of the first variance, which was granted by the BZA on Thursday, Academy Sports will be able to keep all three entrances to the site off Kingston Drive, even though the zoning code would ordinarily allow just two.
One of the entrances, the northernmost one, which serves the delivery docks on to the rear of the building, can definitely remain at its current width of 30.25 feet, which exceeds the maximum of 24 feet in the UDO. In response to the second variance request, for greater widths for all three driveways, the BZA granted a variance only for the width of the northern entrance.
The middle and southern entrances, which are also wider than 24 feet—at 30.25 feet and 28 feet, respectively—might eventually be allowed to remain wider than the maximum. But the BZA did not grant the variance for the width of the other two driveways. What might allow the driveways to remain as wide as they are now would be an authorization from the city engineer. But the city engineer’s review is not yet complete.
A turning radius diagram for 18-wheelers on the site, printed off on a large poster board, was part of the presentation from the Academy Sports team.
The third variance involved islands in the existing parking lot. The UDO requires that the surface of islands be below the level of the parking lot and include a cut in the curbing, to allow for stormwater runoff to flow into the island to allow for natural treatment and filtration. Under the terms of the variance granted by the BZA, Academy Sports will still have to comply with the UDO requirement for the new islands that it plans to install, but not for the existing islands.
The fourth variance requested by Academy Sports was from the UDO requirement that the bicycle parking, which it is planning to install, be covered. The fourth variance request was rejected outright by the BZA.
The team from Academy Sports included John Kranyak, who is vice president for real estate and construction at the company, who came up from Houston to deliver his remarks.
A point of emphasis for Kranyak was the company’s economic impact on Bloomington. “We employ between 65 and 100 people in our stores. We serve hundreds of thousands of customers a year,“ Kranyak said.
Kranyak said Academy Sports would be making a “significant investment to what is otherwise a blighted piece of real estate with a vacant building.”
The fact that variances were needed at all—for a building and a landscaping layout that already exists—stemmed from the longer-than-12-month vacancy of the building.
The ownership group for the building includes David and Eric Kamen, with Bryan Rental. They gave part of the presentation last Thursday.
Even though the Kamens’ previous building tenant, Marsh Supermarkets, had used the building for a similar purpose, because the building had sat vacant for more than 12 months, any use of the building was considered a new use under Bloomington’s UDO. The new use made it subject to compliance with some of the UDO’s newer requirements.
The point of the 12-month vacancy feature of the UDO is to allow the city an occasional chance to require incremental improvements to existing buildings and landscaping layouts. If they were being built from scratch, they would have to be in full compliance with the new features of the UDO—which are supposed to reflect community consensus about reduced conflict points for traffic, management of stormwater runoff, and support for non-automobile transportation options, among other topics.
