‘Please do not hate me’: Walnut Creek fight over Chick-fil-A catches small bakery in the crossfire

WALNUT CREEK — Plans for a new Chick-fil-A at a Walnut Creek shopping center have erupted into an intense spat between hundreds of neighbors and city planners — and caught one of the last tenants there in the crossfire.

Residents and public officials are at odds about whether replacing a vacant bank at the Citrus Marketplace Shopping Center with the fast food chicken chain will bring new life to this sleepy Walnut Creek plaza, or further inundate traffic along the bustling Ygnacio Valley Road commuter bypass nearby.

Rica Zaharia opened her bakery, European Delights, on the property two years ago, and it has become a beloved hidden gem for finding specialty croissants, brioche, pavlova, strudel and other internationally inspired pastries baked from scratch.

Now surrounded by 10 vacant properties on the lot, the 63-year-old Transylvania native has welcomed the idea of a new Chick-fil-A with open arms — not for its menu or conservative politics, but for its potential to help generate much-needed foot traffic to protect the plaza’s small businesses that she says are currently “dying every day.” The quiet plaza’s current tenants include a BevMo, Panda Express, small ice cream shop, youth gymnastics center, postal office and a hair salon.

Despite the city’s intention to help bring more businesses into the lingering vacant spaces, Zaharia has been the lone Walnut Creek resident voicing support for the initiative.

“Please do not hate me,” Zaharia said at the City Council’s May 21 meeting, addressing the backlash against her position on the Chick-fil-A proposal. “More than any other shopping center in Walnut Creek, this place feels like a ghost town.”

The approval of Chick-fil-A’s initial permits has enraged dozens of neighbors of the affluent Woodlands neighborhood up the street, who fiercely argued that the planned Chick-fil-A, located at 2290 Oak Grove Rd., would increase vehicular traffic to the already-congested and dangerous roads in the northernmost corner of the city, diminish property values and attract loiterers and criminals.

Despite concessions from the city’s elected officials — including barring the 5,363-square-foot Chick-fil-A project from constructing a drive-thru lane, forcing the restaurant to close by at least 10 p.m. and requiring traffic, odor and other mitigation measures — neighbors were still upset by the City Council’s approval in May.

Now, Zaharia says she’s faced backlash from angry neighbors — including threats of a boycott — for her belief that a Chick-fil-A would help the entire plaza as well as her own business, which has taken a steep financial downturn since the fight over fried chicken first began. She had to reduce the bakery’s hours at the end of July, after the slowest sales month in the two years she’s operated at Citrus Marketplace.

“When people start telling me and others how to think and what to do, that is not allowable,” Zaharia said in an interview. “I’ve worked 17 hours almost every single day — starting at 3 a.m. — for the past two years. I’m not tired, because I’m doing everything out of passion and to make my customers happy, but we cannot find enough people to sell our products to.”

After five hours of intense public testimony — wholly against the Chick-fil-A, other than Zaharia’s comments — the Walnut Creek City Council unanimously denied the appeal to the restaurant’s draft plans.

City staff said any spike in traffic sparked by the fast food chain would be minuscule, citing their finding that the Chick-fil-A would add mere seconds to average wait times at that busy intersection. The project will now return to Walnut Creek’s Design Review Commission for final design review of the future restaurant’s proposed architecture, landscaping and signage.

During public commenting on the project, opponents rejected the data provided by months of research conducted by Walnut Creek’s urban planners and traffic consultants and demanded that the city deny or at least delay approving Chick-fil-A’s plans, claiming the city was unduly prioritizing fried chicken over the character of their neighborhood and quality of life.

“The City Council has attempted to create a culture, a charm and a sense of small community over a number of years,” said Corban Porter, an attorney and Woodlands resident who appealed previous project approvals. “We submitted 200 signatures of Woodlands residents and nearly 700 surveys, most of which identified concerns relative to health and safety … to allow this to go forward without doing any substantive study of the neighborhood more fully is unconscionable.”

While a handful of public speakers raved about delicious baked goods at European Delights and expressed support for similar small businesses, the Woodlands can’t have their pastries and eat them, too.

First, city officials argued, there was no legal reason that Walnut Creek could outright deny the project during its May 21 meeting, as it conforms with the city’s zoning and general plans for development. Second, construction of the Chick-fil-A could have been speedily approved months ago, had the business not opted for a conditional use permit to allow take-out dining services.

On top of safety concerns for the scores of youth who walk and bike to nearby schools, numerous residents were also wary of the Atlanta-based chicken restaurant’s conservative reputation and history of financially supporting anti-LGBTQ groups.

Chick-fil-A “is not reflective of our community’s inclusive and diverse values,” said Jessica Hunt, a 40-year Woodlands resident, local small business owner and the incoming PTA president for Valley Verde Elementary.

However, it is illegal to withhold approval due to the company’s political or religious stances, and local governments cannot supersede landlords on private market decisions.

Councilmember Kevin Wilk also pointed out that Citrus Marketplace is virtually vacant. Business suffered a major downturn after March 2022, when a former Nob Hill grocery store on the lot shuttered, a move blamed on skyrocketing rents. Since then, it’s been increasingly difficult to get other businesses to sign commercial leases, according to representatives from DPI Realty, the plaza’s landlord since 2001.

Wilk lives close to the Woodlands, but even closer to the traffic rolling to the Whole Foods, Walgreens, Rocco’s pizzeria and other businesses at the Encina Grande Shopping Center, less than a half-mile from Citrus Marketplace on the other side of Ygnacio Valley Road. After explaining that traffic near his home is not as bad as he once feared, he rejected the idea that city staff did not do its due diligence in reviewing the details and impacts of Chick-fil-A’s future development.

“It’s not like businesses are banging down the doors of shopping centers that they have to have their business in there,” Wilk said. “We’ve got a shopping center there now that we need to help survive.”