Opinion
Walmart wants to open a delivery depot at 121 Webster Avenue, in the Home Depot plaza. The petition calls it a supermarket, because Chelsea’s zoning has no category for what it really is. No one from Chelsea could walk in and buy a carton of milk there. Orders placed online would be packed inside and driven away by delivery drivers in their own cars, from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m. A board member put it plainly at the September 8 hearing: if you receive products, store inventory and ship to customers, “that’s a distribution center.”
The Zoning Board of Appeals should deny the special permit. Here is why.
The traffic lands on us; the customers can be anywhere
By Walmart’s own count, the depot would generate about 350 vehicle trips a day, with 46 in its busiest hour. Those trips would come and go on Webster Avenue, a two-lane street that already carries Home Depot, Burlington, Dollar General, the dispensary and the Registry office. Residents who live there told the board it can take half an hour to cover less than half a mile at rush hour, and worse when the bridge on Eastern Avenue is up.
The applicant described the delivery area by drive time, about 30 minutes, not by map. A board member suggested that would mean Chelsea, Everett, Revere, Winthrop and probably East Boston. If that is right, Chelsea would take the cars, the trucks, the noise and the wear on its streets so that customers across five communities can get groceries faster.
The box trucks could be held to a route. The drivers cannot. Walmart’s own engineer told the board the delivery drivers cannot be restricted to any route, because their job is to drive into the neighborhoods. Those drivers work through an app, and residents who have driven for a living warned the board about what time pressure does to driving on steep, narrow streets like the ones around the Soldiers’ Home.
The numbers keep changing
At the August 11 hearing, according to the draft minutes, Walmart’s representative said the depot would have 10 to 20 employees per shift, about 40 jobs, and that the loading dock can take a full tractor-trailer. At the September 8 hearing, the jobs were about 20 on site, and there would be no tractor-trailers. The engineer acknowledged that 18 driver trips in the peak hour could mean 18 orders or 50, depending on how orders are batched. The comparison data came from a Walmart depot in Boston that, by the applicant’s account, had been open only a few weeks.
A permit lasts. Estimates built on a few weeks of data from somewhere else are not a sound basis for a permanent use on a congested street.
Conditions only work if someone enforces them
City staff have proposed conditions in case the board approves: every truck in and out by Revere Beach Parkway, a community meeting before opening, better landscaping, dark-sky lighting. Neighbors have heard promises like these before. Roseann Bongiovanni told the board in August that a truck ban on Stockton Street, set when Parkway Plaza was redeveloped years ago, is no longer enforced, and that her parents moved their bedroom to the other side of their house because of the trucks. Until the city can show it enforces the conditions already on the books in that plaza, a new list of conditions is not much of a protection.
Who benefits
The case for the depot deserves a fair hearing. The building has been empty since 2019. Supporters, including three city councillors and the area’s state representative, wrote that it would bring jobs and tax revenue and serve seniors and people without cars, and that it accepts EBT. A resident who rides the bus described how hard it is to carry cases of water home in winter. Those are real needs.
But grocery delivery already exists in Chelsea, and a few dozen jobs do not outweigh hundreds of daily trips on a street that is already jammed. The Planning Board weighed the same arguments and voted 4 to 3 to recommend denial, finding that the traffic and the fit with the neighborhood outweighed the benefits. Councillor-at-Large Leo Robinson put it simply: “We can do better.”
After the Planning Board’s vote, the building’s owner asked to put the case off until November 10 for more outreach. Two rounds of door-knocking have so far produced 7 written supporters.
What we are asking
We ask the Zoning Board to deny the special permit. If the board is inclined to approve it anyway, it should first require:
- An independent traffic study, paid for by the applicant but chosen by the city, that counts weekday rush hours and bridge openings, not the applicant’s projections.
- A firm cap on daily vehicle trips, with yearly counts reported to the city and the permit open to review if the cap is broken.
- A truck route written into the permit, with penalties, and enforcement of the existing Stockton Street truck ban before the depot opens.
- A written commitment on how many of the jobs go to Chelsea residents, and a public report on it each year.
Chelsea has spent decades carrying more than its share of the region’s trucks, fuel tanks and traffic. A warehouse that serves five communities and sells nothing to the one it sits in should not be next.