The Bakersfield Commons shopping, office and residential complex is planned for the 255 acres at the northwest corner of Coffee and Brimhall roads.

A planned shopping, office and residential development at Coffee and Brimhall is scaling back its size.

Bakersfield Commons is still promising to bring the stores that Bakersfield residents now drive to Santa Barbara for — just less of them.

The retail portion of the site was expected to be 1 million square feet. Now it’s down to 850,000 square feet.

That’s still 19.5 acres of store floor.

The office portion has been shrunk from 1 million square feet to 600,000 square feet.

The view of the future Bakersfield Commons property looking west from Coffee Road. Photo by Jennifer Baldwin

The project will still take up the 255 acres available at the site, but it will now be a little less dense. It will also still feature 425 residential units, which generate less traffic per acre than commercial.

Traffic has been the issue that the property owner, World Oil, and the city have been sparring over.

The view of the future Bakersfield Commons property looking north from Brimhall Road. Photo by Jennifer Baldwin

“The city wanted us to make the project smaller so the traffic impacts would be less than they would be,” said Steve Sugerman, spokesman for the project, who also provided the square-footage figures. “We’re pleased with this plan and we hope the city is too.”

The developer submitted its new traffic study just last week, so city officials haven’t had a chance to evaluate the new numbers.

The developer points to the infill nature of the site — it’s in the middle of the city, just a short drive from the Northwest Promenade retail area — as a benefit. But, ironically, that also causes the city’s problems with it.

“They picked a very difficult location where there are multiple problem areas,” said City Manager Alan Tandy. He said there may be as many 15 intersections and road sections that would be affected by the additional traffic Bakersfield Commons would draw, and it’s up to the developer to come up with a plan to deal with those issues.

In a PR campaign promoting the plan, developers have pointed to economic benefits — jobs created and tax dollars to the city. Now those benefits have to be refigured to reflect the reduced number of cash registers on the eventual site.

Councilman David Couch, whose ward includes the project site, said those benefits themselves aren’t a good enough reason to just approve the project. He called that the “fiscalization of land use.”

“When you begin making decisions based on how much taxes you’re going to receive, you don’t end up with as good a product as if you’re looking at the impacts,” Couch said. “It can still be a very large project, and there’ll still be a great economic benefit to the county and city, and there will still be a number of jobs created.”

Sugerman said he expects the formal public process — release of an environmental document and a comment period — to start before the end of this year, and stores to open in a few years. The full build-out of the site is expected to take 20 to 30 years.