Chick-fil-A appears to be bailing out of Riverton Commons site

What a difference five days makes – on Monday, April 23, County Administrator Doug Stanley was updating the Front Royal Town Council on progress with national restaurant chain Chick-fil-A’s plan for development of the former Chevy Chase/Capital One bank site in the Riverton Commons Shopping Center; by Friday, April 27, it appears that deal is dead. It remains unclear if Chick-fil-A will seek another site in the county or Town of Front Royal.

It appears that Warren County officials were blindsided by the news that Chick-fil-A has either terminated or given notice of its intent to terminate its lease with the development company owner of the lot on which  it had planned to build at Riverton Commons.

On Monday, April 30, County Planning Director Taryn Logan confirmed the county had received indirect notice that Chick-fil-A was abandoning its planned Riverton Commons location. That news came from the development company that owns the vacant bank lot that Chick-fil-A was in the process of submitting site plans and building permits for.

Logan said she has attempted to contact Chick-fil-A management directly but has yet to receive a call back. The county planning director noted her department was in the middle of the Chick-fil-A approval process when the news hit. Chick-fil-A submitted a building permit application on April 5, as the county administrator told the town council on April 23.

Under the heading “Site Plan Review for the proposed Chick-fil-A at Riverton Commons” Stanley’s April 23 update to the Town says, “They are proposing to demolish the former Chevy Chase/Capital One bank building in Riverton Commons Shopping Center to construct a 5,000 square foot restaurant with two drive-through lanes.”

Lying as it does just off the Interstate-66 intersection with state Route 340/522 in Warren County’s North Commercial Corridor, that location seems a commercially viable one for one of the nation’s top food franchises. There was some municipal and consumer excitement that what by various rankings has become one of, if not the nation’s leading fast food franchise was on the verge of consummating an on-again, off-again courtship that began years ago.

So what went wrong?

Stanley’s Development Review Committee summary of the Chick-fil-A status adds, “The engineer is currently addressing agency comments, including DEQ comments and will be resubmitting the site plan in the near future.”

Was there something in either the DEQ or other agency comments on its site plan that rubbed Chick-fil-A management the wrong way?

Did the company continue to have concerns about the informal nature of a 2015 Memorandum of Understanding between the town and county governments ending years of bickering over how corridor tax revenues would be split in the wake of the Town’s lost meals tax lawsuit of 2010?

As Royal Examiner has reported those recent 2018 votes legally formalizing the informal 2015 Town-County “Voluntary Settlement Agreement” MOA were brought forward by Chick-fil-A’s stated concerns that either municipality could pull out of the agreement at short notice. Such action Chick-fil-A feared could lead to the Town’s re-imposition of its own Meals Tax-based PILOT (Payment In Lieu Of Taxes) fees in the corridor, leading to an essentially double meals-taxing scenario.

However, it would seem the Atlanta-area company shouldn’t have such concerns after the County and Town both unanimously voted approval of formalization of that Voluntary Settlement Agreement on April 3 and 9, respectively; with the Town further incorporating that formalization into its town codes on April 23.

So, pending a call back from Chick-fil-A management to the county government or this reporter, what exactly went wrong at the Riverton Commons site remains an unknown – as does what that decision means for the company’s previously-stated plan to locate in Warren County.