MOUNT VERNON – Petco plans a 10,900-square-foot retail store on Coschocton Avenue, and is seeking a parking variance, according to documents filed with the city of Mount Vernon.
Embree Development Group made the request, dated Dec. 3, for the Board of Zoning Appeals to approve a reduction of parking by 29 spaces, dropping the number of spaces to 44. The Board of Zoning Appeals will hold a public hearing on the request at 5:30 p.m. on Jan. 5 at City Hall.
In the request, the developer said city code requires retail stores to have one parking space for each 150 square feet of floor area. The 10,900-square-foot retail store would require 73 parking spaces without the variance.
“To meet the requirement, the building would have to downsize, and this would not meet Petco’s business model,” the developer said in the variance request.
The Bob Evans restaurant next door has 88 parking spaces, as restaurants with seating are required to have one parking space for every three persons of capacity.
Petco would have a shared driveway with the restaurant and would not increase congestion on Coschocton Avenue, according to Embree Development Group.
Petco’s director of Real Estate Data Science said in a study filed with the variance request that at peak times Petco will have 25 to 35 guests per hour, each averaging about 10 minutes in the store. That results in an average of six to 10 guests in the store at a time, Daniel Herrlin of Petco said.
“To ensure that we meet the needs of all of our guests even in the busiest of times we target 20 convenient parking spots for our customers, with another 10 parking spaces for our store associates,” Herrlin said in the report. “Thirty total parking spaces will be more than adequate to meet our guests’ and associates’ needs for our Petco store in Mount Vernon, Ohio.”
