Council approves specific use permit for McDonald’s restaurant in McKinney

Council members eventually approved the permit request with a 4-3 vote after a motion to deny it failed. Council members Geré Feltus, Rick Franklin and Michael Jones voted against approval. Feltus said her “major concern still remains” regarding the project.

“It’s not the entrance to the dog park,” she said. “It’s not the deceleration lane for me. It is the high speeds at which people come around that curve and people coming out to make that left turn.”

Council member Justin Beller said the council previously approved development at the location with the intent that it’s a developable site.

“To go back and say we’re not going to allow that development because of road design or because of ingress-egress that we approved to begin with, we’re going to make it very hard for developers to do projects in McKinney,” he said.

City staff recommended approval of the permit request, according to a city document. McKinney’s Planning and Zoning Commission recommended approval of the request in August.

The background

The McDonald’s restaurant will be located between a Walmart Neighborhood Market and Bonnie Wenk Park. The property is currently zoned as a planned development district that requires a specific use permit to operate a drive-thru restaurant.

Council members had previously considered and denied a similar request for the restaurant at the same location in 2024. Since then, the restaurant’s entrance locations have been shifted from the south side of the site to the west side.

When a new permit request was presented to the council Sept. 2, it was tabled until Sept. 16. At the Sept. 16 meeting, council members tabled it indefinitely to give the applicant time to work with the city’s engineering department on potential traffic mitigation solutions, Planning Director Lucas Raley said.

What the applicant is saying

Leslie Ford, co-founder of Ofi Chito, spoke on behalf of the applicant during the Jan. 6 meeting. Since the item was tabled in September, development officials have had conversations with the city’s engineering staff, traffic engineers at Kimley-Horn and other project stakeholders, Ford said.

Officials were looking at different options for restricting a left turn from the parking lot onto Virginia Parkway, as suggested by some council members in September. Those options could have included a raised curb that prevents left turns.

“The overall feeling was that as much as this seems like it would be something that would help, it actually wouldn’t,” she said. “What happens is whenever you restrict movements, it typically consolidates the traffic elsewhere and so what it does is it actually creates bottlenecks and problems at additional points. It doesn’t actually solve for what we were trying to solve for here.”

Another option considered by project officials was closing off one access point to Bonnie Wenk Park, located within the parking lot, Ford said. That option was considered the “nuclear option,” she said.

“If the issue is truly that there’s too much traffic here at the property, one way we could reduce the traffic is to close off that access point to [Bonnie Wenk Park],” she said. “But we know after talking with staff and after talking with engineering—we know that there’s strong sentiment that that remain and that was our thought too. We did not want to do that.”

Virginia Parkway averaged about 39,000 vehicles a day on either side of Hardin Boulevard in 2023, according to McKinney’s traffic dashboard. That’s an increase from 2021, when the road averaged about 33,000 west of Hardin Boulevard and 32,000 cars east of Hardin Boulevard.

Ford’s presentation also included traffic projections for a drive-thru coffee shop instead of a McDonald’s restaurant. A drive-thru coffee shop is allowed by right at the site under the current zoning, Ford said.

“What we found is that the drive-thru coffee shop would actually have more trips per day but their trips are concentrated in the morning hours,” she said.

A coffee shop would generate a larger number of daily trips compared to a McDonald’s drive-thru, Ford said.

What city officials are saying

Feltus, who made the motion to deny the item, called the intersection “very uncomfortable,” even for experienced drivers. Though she appreciated the solutions presented, she said it still doesn’t solve the issue of drivers making a left turn onto Virginia Parkway.

“My major concern is having a very high-volume restaurant that is at that area,” she said. “I’m still adamantly opposed to that.”

Franklin said he would be more apt to vote for this request if he knew there was going to be a traffic light installed at the entrance to Bonnie Wenk Park.

“It just generates too much traffic at that location,” he said.

Engineering Director Gary Graham said city officials could examine installing a traffic signal at the entrance to the development or to Bonnie Wenk Park, but there are no current plans for one.

He said McKinney’s streets are going to “get more and more congested” as the city’s population increases and officials won’t be able to put a traffic signal everywhere. City officials have gone out and tried to improve site visibility along the road by trimming trees, he said.

Mayor Bill Cox said he agreed with the applicant’s request. If not a drive-thru McDonald’s, then something else will be developed that could have the same traffic effect, he said.

“The site needs to be developed and I truly respect the staff that we have and the work they do and the expertise that they have when they look at something like this,” he said.