Wanted: A diversified business community

March 28, 2003

Here's your chance to play city planner for a day. The Oakley Chamber of Commerce is working on a survey to try to find out what kind of businesses should be invited to open up shop in Oakley. Currently the city's redevelopment director, Ellen Bonneville is out looking for businesses who would be interested in a fast-growing area with little and few services available for the public.

Already, Safeway is opening a shopping center on the corner of O'Hara Avenue and Laurel Road, and when they open they will be inviting other stores to come into town. The developer will be looking for small businesses to lease space attached to the store, just like Albertsons and Raley's have. The most popular choices for a developer are dry cleaners and video rental stores.

Those decisions would be unfortunate for Oakley residents, especially because Oakley already has three cleaners and three places where we can rent videos. And while I am sure these developers can show you that these businesses will be successful in their shopping center, it will dilute the market too much for the other shops and quite possibly cause one of them to have to go out of business.

Besides that, Oakley residents are in need of so many types of businesses, why duplicate services that are already being provided? Thus the reason for the survey. The main question being: What businesses would you like to see? The hope is that enough response from the survey will help Bonneville and city go out and find those types of businesses to come to Oakley.

With this survey in mind, earlier in the week I went out and asked the question to shoppers at Raley's in Oakley and some of the results were disturbing. People, use your imagination! Here is your chance to have any kind of business at all. Not duplications of what we have. What do you have to drive to Brentwood or Antioch for every other week because we don't sell it here in Oakley?

Why do you have to go out of your way, when all you would have to do is drive down the street? So let's not think about the five people who told me that Oakley should have a day spa when there are already two downtown, or a place where you can get gift and collectible items which we already have several here in Oakley.

Maryanne Freedman said she is looking for something more in the lines of Brentwood's new Sand Creek shopping center. Besides a grocery store, the shopping center includes a retail clothing store, TJ Maxx, which she thinks Oakley really needs. There is also a furniture store, a candle store, a children's second hand store and more. All of which she believes the people of Oakley would patronize if they had the chance.

Mark Port said that he would be interested in a real book store in Oakley, as well as a toy store for his three-year-old.

Kim Nader said that whatever the business it would have to be a place that had items for a reasonable cost and that people would use every day. She said something that we can't already get from Raley's or Rite Aid. She would love to have a Target in town, but figured that because Brentwood is getting a Target and Mervyn's on Lone Tree Way we probably won't see one for many years to come.

Surveys will be available in local businesses in the next couple of weeks, so keep an eye out for them. In the meantime, try to think about what you want to see. Oakley has a lot of room to grow. Be part of the action. Maybe the city won't be able to get all the businesses we want, but ideas of what the community is looking for will send them in the right direction.

Roni Gehlke's column on life in Oakley appears each week in the Brentwood News.

Distributed by the Contra Costa Times

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