Merced, CA. Draft Environmental Report On Wal-Mart Distribution Center Finally Released

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The bigger they come---they harder they fall. In August 2005, Wal-Mart
announced that it wanted to build an enormous distribution center in
Merced, California. Almost immediately a group was formed to prevent that
from happening. The Merced Stop Wal-Mart Action Team (SWAT) began what is
now a three and a half year campaign to do battle with Wal-Mart.
“Unfortunately,” the group wrote, “the same reasons that Wal-Mart chose to
locate in Merced make it wrong for our community, which has the highest
rates of foreclosure and air pollution in the nation. Usually,
distribution centers are built miles from residential neighborhoods.” In
Merced, Wal-Mart chose to locate half a mile from hundreds of new homes.
The land they want is surrounding on three sides by residential property,
and a school on the fourth. According to SWAT, the project will bring many
negative impacts to the community. This enormous project will consume 270
acres on the southeast side of Merced, a community of roughly 70,000
people. The Distribution Center will pave over 100 acres of prime
farmland, to create a 1,200,000 s.f. building—the equivalent of six
supercenters under one roof, or 24 football fields. The pavement and
parking lot for the facility is 4,353,000 s.f. There is room at the site
for 300 parking spaces for tractor-trailers. In one 18 hour day, a total
of 450 trucks will grind in and out of the facility, plus 1,075 passenger
cars per day. SWAT says the project will create severe air pollution,
including diesel pollution, which causes cancer, asthma and other health
problems. SWAT notes that the embattled Barstow, California proposed
Wal-Mart distribution center will generate 556 tons of particulates every
year from diesel trucks. The California Air Resources Board recently found
that exposure to particulate (soot) causes nearly 3,000 Valley residents
to die prematurely every year. “Concentrating that much pollution in the
San Joaquin Valley and Southeast Merced amounts to a potential death
sentence for our children and elders,” SWAT charges. Inevitably traffic
accidents will increase, and pedestrian safety will deteriorate. Noise
impacts from the facility include alarm systems, loudspeaker system, truck
& car traffic, radios, reverse indicators (beeps), trailer droppings, etc.
The lights for the facility will be placed on 40-ft poles and structured
walls, making the night nearly as bright as the day, operating 24/7 for
365 days a year.

The facility will require a 20,000 gallon underground
storage fuel tank, plus aboveground diesel tanks, oil tanks, and waste oil
tanks. The DC will store and transfer hazardous materials. “Every inch of
rainfall on the site will result in 3 million gallons of runoff from the
site,” SWAT says. “Despite detention pond facilities, runoff ends up in
the storm sewers, groundwater and surface water.” The group warns that
contaminated runoff will seep into Merced’s groundwater, a source of the
city’s drinking water. The site itself is located in a FEMA Flood Hazard
Zone. The city will have to deal with the DC’s waste byproducts, including
55,000 gallons of sewage per day, and significant road repair costs
attributable to heavy truck traffic. Many of the County roads around the
distribution center are already crumbling into chunks of asphalt. The
existence of organized opposition has forced the city of Merced to proceed
carefully with this project, knowing that litigation could follow their
decision to approve the plan. On September 18, 2008, Sprawl-Busters
reported that the Merced City Council had agreed to spend another $45,000
to study the environmental impact of turning agriculture land into a
trucking facility. Wal-Mart will pay for the added cost of the study,
which will delay any vote on the project until sometime in 2009. According
to the newspaper, more study was needed to make the environmental study
“bulletproof before its release to the public.” According to the Merced
Sun-Star, “Merced has made a point to make it defensible in court,
ordering a third-party to pore over it, searching for holes or weak parts
that could be targeted by attorneys.” The review has now been going on for
two years. So far, the city has spent nearly $450,000 on the environmental
review—supposedly to be paid for in its entirety by Wal-Mart. The money
also will pay for additional traffic studies and revisions to the noise
and air quality analyses. SWAT says in 2006, the City of Merced ordered
$114,885 in environmental studies, “but it took a delinquent payment
notice and the threat of a referral to Collections to get the biggest
corporation in the world to pay up.” This week, the Central Valley
Business Times reports that the draft Environmental Impact Report (DEIR)
on the proposed distribution center in Merced is finally being released to
the public at 11 a.m. Wednesday, Feb. 25th. Copies of the report will be
available on a CD in the lobby on the first floor of the Merced Civic
Center, 678 W. 18th St. A downloadable copy of the draft EIR also will be
posted on the city’s website, http://www.cityofmerced.org under the “Public
Information” listing. This CD is likely to become one of the hottest CDs
in the history of Merced. The release of the DEIR begins a 60 day public
review, which ends on April 27th. From there, the consultants who wrote
the report will review and respond to questions raised by the DEIR. This
means a city council vote is not likely until the summer. SWAT hopes to
make it a very hot summer for the Merced city council. “Merced is our
home,” the group has said. “We will protect it.”

The DEIR consultant told the Sun Star last Fall that it expects “an
unusually large number of detailed comment letters once the draft goes
public.” SWAT responded to the city’s latest increase in spending by
pointing out that in 2006 the city ordered $114,885 in review work to be
done, but Wal-Mart did not pay the bill until a delinquent payment notice
and the threat of a referral to a collection agency was made. “If Wal-Mart
already repeatedly sues cities until their tax assessment is reduced,” the
group said, “doesn’t bother to pay its debts to one of the poorest cities
in the U.S., and locks its janitors inside to save money, imagine if City
Council lets Wal-Mart dumps its pollution on Southeast Merced.” The group
is hoping that Wal-Mart will back out of its plans for Merced. “At the end
of July, Wal-Mart pulled out of an 800,000 s.f. distribution center near
the Port of Savannah, Georgia, citing the need to ‘streamline
efficiencies’ in its operations.” SWAT says that rumors of closure have
plagued Wal-Mart’s St. Landy Parish, Louisiana distribution center near
Baton Rouge. “Wal-Mart wants to dump its distribution center in Merced at
a location that may have made sense 10 years ago,” SWAT concludes, “but is
becoming increasingly untenable even for Wal-Mart’s bottom line. That
said, the distribution center has never made sense to thousands of Merced
families deeply concerned about our health and quality of life.” SWAT has
on its website a 14 minute video from Porterville, California, which has a
distribution center near residential homes. In the video neighbors
complain of the idling trucks, the dirt and diesel fume, the constant
noise (“you have to sleep with the TV on”) the lights all night, and the
traffic (“trucks and kids don’t mix”). Readers are urged to go to the
town’s website and download a copy of the DEIR. Comments can be submitted
in writing to Kim Espinosa, planning manager, City of Merced Planning and
Permitting, 678 W. 18th St, Merced, Calif., 95340. Readers are urged to
email comments to , or to send a message like
this: “Dear Ms. Espinosa, There is a reason why residents of communities
like Merced and Barstow are fighting with everything they have to stop the
huge Wal-Mart distribution centers. That’s because everything they have is
on the line. The quality of life in their community is on the line. The
size of these distribution center projects boggles the mind. It would be a
task just to walk around the perimeter of a building the size of 24
football fields! The number one commitment that the 7 members of the city
council have made to Merced residents is to “maintain a high quality of
life” for your citizens. The fact is, a distribution center surrounded by
low-density agricultural land and residential property are incompatible
land uses. When incompatible uses are squeezed together, it creates
winners and losers. In this case, the neighbors lose big time---and that’s
the hallmark of bad land use planning. Wal-Mart’s truck facility is not
just an unpleasant neighbor, it’s an unhealthy neighbor as well, given the
air pollution this project will bring. The only reasonable way to
accommodate a project like this is to size it correctly for the
surrounding neighborhood, or find another location entirely. It is not
Merced’s fault that Wal-Mart builds trucking warehouses larger than one
million square feet. The retailer should be forced to fit into Merced, not
the reverse. This is part of the company’s unsustainable footprint. And
when the time comes that company decides the facility is too large or
outdated, the city will be left with the largest abandoned building in
your history. Before the environmental review is completed, ask your
consultants to study a project half or one-quarter of the size, and ask
Wal-Mart now to shrink the size and the impact of this store. But under no
circumstances should a massive project of this scale be forced on
unwilling residential neighbors. If you are going to trash their home
values and their health, you should offer to totally abate their property
taxes---for those who are unlucky enough to be unable to sell their homes
at a loss and get out. To proceed with this project as proposed is
reckless, and shows total disregard for your own taxpaying homeowners.
Don’t make the same mistakes that Porterville made. Distribution centers
and residential property just doesn’t mix. This intense use of land is
incompatible with surrounding land uses, and on those grounds alone,
should be rejected.” For more background on the DEIR, and comments to
make, go to the SWAT website in a couple of weeks at:
http://www.mercedstopwalmart.org/home.html.

Posted by Al Norman on Tuesday, February 24, 2009