Broomfield, CO. City Offers Wal-Mart $7.85 Million Welfare Payment
City officials in Broomfield, Colorado have offered to pay for 49% of the cost of site acquisition for a Wal-Mart supercenter—a deal that will save Wal-Mart $7.85 million, funded by taxpayers.
The funding will come in the form of a sales tax to pay off the landowner, since Wal-Mart did not offer enough money to close the deal. So the city is giving them welfare to cover the shortfall. Sprawl-Busters received a report this week from a resident who is upset by this public subsidy, and collusion between Wal-Mart and city officials over their proposed supercenter. “It seems that our city council may be up to no good,” he writes.
“They have an urban renewal plan which will impact me and others in my area. The plan involves expanding a small side street and adding retail and living space. In order for their pet project to go through, they need money.
Unfortunately, the city doesn’t have the money for the project. So, they have the idea of getting a box retailer in the area to foot the bill. Just walking distance from my house there is a company called Barber’s Turkeys. They are a processing plant for turkey bits. They have quite a few acres surrounding their building. Well, guess who they have been talking to since February? It seems that Wal-Mart has their eyes on this property.The city of Broomfield has put together a relocation package for Barber’s.
Their property is worth about $5 million. The city is offering them about $16 million to get out of town. There are a few of us that think the city is secretly negotiating with Wal-Mart. From what I understand, about the same time the city passed the measure to pay the $16 million, they also authorized a request for proposals from retailers. The window of opportunity is only 30 days. Is this fair to the citizens of Broomfield?”
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Topics: Community Impact | Economic/Small Business
Posted by Al Norman on Friday, September 22, 2006 | Permalink
Kilbuck, PA. Wal-Mart Developer Uses Too Many Explosives, Shuts Down Road
Wal-Mart is doing a landslide business in Kilbuck, Pennsylvania—literally.
A report in the Tribune-Review today says that all lanes of Route 65 near a Wal-Mart construction site have been shut down, and a state transportation official said, “"It’s going to be a long time until this road is reopened. It’s still coming down. There’s trees, rocks, dirt sliding down. It’s not safe right now.”
This same stretch of highway was closed for two days in late April, because construction crews working to clear land for a $28 million Wal-Mart shopping center used too many explosives, which caused the hillside to collapse, and a half-mile stretch of highway had to be closed. Wal-Mart’s developers had to pay for the first cleanup, and PennDOT says they will have to clean it up again. “We may assist in the interest of getting the road open again,”said a DOT official, “but they’re going to do the clean-up.”
The construction on the roadway was necessary to accommodate the new Wal-Mart supercenter. The road has to be widened to add turning lanes into the supercenter. The firm that handled the explosives for the Wal-Mart detonated debris onto the roadway last April.
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Topics: Community Impact | Crime & Safety
Posted by Al Norman on Friday, September 22, 2006 | Permalink
Old Wal-Marts linger empty
From the Raleigh News & Observer:
The massive building sits abandoned behind hundreds of empty parking spaces at the Hillsborough Commons shopping center.
Once bustling with shoppers, the former Wal-Mart just off South Churton Street has been quiet since the retail giant replaced it in 2003 with a Wal-Mart Supercenter three times its size a few miles up Interstate 85.
“The day they left, it was like a tomb over there,” said Mark Bateman, who owned a video store a few doors down and saw his and other merchants’ sales suffer without Wal-Mart pulling shoppers in.
Empty Wal-Mart buildings plague communities across the nation. At any given time, about 350 former Wal-Marts lie vacant in America, according to Al Norman of Sprawl-Busters, an organization that opposes big-box stores. At least nine empty former Wal-Mart spaces—the equivalent of 12 football fields in size—occupied North Carolina as of February, Norman said.
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Posted by Russ Fagaly on Tuesday, September 19, 2006 | Permalink
Hartford, WI. Wal-Mart Offers to Pay Half of City’s Legal Fees
On August 6, 2006, Sprawl-Busters described the battle over a Wal-Mart supercenter in Hartford, Wisconsin, and the efforts of local residents to stop the giant retailer. Five weeks later, here is an update from the battlefield in Hartford.
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Topics: Community Impact | Organizing
Posted by Al Norman on Tuesday, September 19, 2006 | Permalink
Mill Creek, WA. Citizens Force County To Conduct Environmental Impact of Wal-Mart
Earlier this month, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported that citizens in Mill Creek, Washington were objecting to the way development and decision-making on land use was happening in their community. A group called the Citizens for a Better Mill Creek organized to fight a proposed 149,000 s.f. Wal-Mart supercenter proposed on the “old Buffalo Farm” site.
The newspaper reported that the group had slammed the brakes on Wal-Mart by appealing its State Environmental Policy Act (SEPA) application and insisting that the developer complete a full-fledged environmental impact study. The group gathered more than 5,700 petition signatures, and researched details of the harm this project would do to the environment.
The site was originally supposed to be used for an office complex. The newspaper reported that one of the leaders of CBMC “pored over sites such as Sprawl-Busters” studying Wal-Mart’s saturation strategy, and its habit of cannibalizing its own stores. Sprawl-Busters has just received the following update from citizens in Mill Creek regarding their victory at the state level in forcing Mill Creek not to take short-cuts with the environmental review process.
Here’s the CBMC update.
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Topics: Environment | Organizing
Posted by Al Norman on Monday, September 18, 2006 | Permalink
Lima, NY. Wal-Mart Supercenter Proposal Suddenly Pulled
On September 14th, Wal-Mart’s proposal to build a 165,000 s.f. store on 53-acres in Lima, New York suddenly imploded. The retailer issued a 41 word press release announcing it was withdrawing from the site. A town official told the local media he suspected that “community controversy” was a key factor in Wal-Mart’s departure. Sprawl-Busters received today the following frontline report from the leaders of the opposition to this project.
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Topics: Community Impact | Site Fights & Local Ordinances | Organizing
Posted by Al Norman on Monday, September 18, 2006 | Permalink
Site Fight of the Week: Wal-Mart Literally Pulls Up Stakes and Quits Site
Local officials in Canton, Illinois have given a Wal-Mart supercenter its last rites this week.
According to the Canton Daily Ledger, members of the city council have pronounced the Wal-Mart project for the old International Harvester site, dead on arrival. The retailer apparently let its options expire on a parcel of land, and the survey stakes on the land are gone. “Quite frankly, that tells me the project is dead at that site,” said the executive director of Spoon River Partnership for Economic Development told the city council.
“We’re obviously going to lose Wal-Mart,” one Councilman said, suggesting that something else should be done with the site. Wal-Mart officials were supposed to deliberate last month on the proposed new site, which is located adjacent to an existing Wal-Mart.
Construction bids for the Wal-Mart Supercenter apparently came in higher than expected because of coal mine shafts on the property.
Without much notice or fanfare, Wal-Mart silently scrubbed its plans for a supercenter in Canton. Sprawl-Busters reported on this story on January 24, 2006. We reported at the time that Councilmen were asking, “Are we ready for that kind of growth?” Canton’s downtown already has an empty hardware store, and 12 other vacant lots. City officials seem unable to reconcile the possible destruction Wal-Mart would do on the edge of the city to their on-going problems maintaining a vital downtown commercial core.
But this week, Wal-Mart left Canton with nothing to show for its months of behind the scenes work but 33 empty acres.
Topics: Community Impact | Economic/Small Business
Posted by Al Norman on Friday, September 15, 2006 | Permalink
Rosemead, CA. Wal-Mart Spends $200,000 To Protect Local Officials From Recall
Wal-Mart often tells local officials it needs help financially to widen a road or lay a sewer line to their stores—but when it comes to protecting elected officials who vote for Wal-Mart, the giant retailer is ready to open up the treasury.
That’s exactly what’s happening in Rosemead, California, where Wal-Mart has invested $200,000 in the campaign to beat back a recall election effort against two City Council members who voted in 2004 for Wal-Mart, despite angry citizen opposition to the supercenter.
An “astro-roots” group (that is, a phoney citizen’s group funded almost entirely by Wal-Mart, has been created as the front group to protect the City Councilors from the wrath of the voters. The “Rosemead Neighbors Against the Recall,” which should really be called the “Rosemead Neighbors Following Wal-Mart Instructions) has received $200,000 from Wal-Mart to protect Mayor Gary Taylor and Councillman Jay Imperial.
Thanks to Wal-Mart money, this group now has the largest amount of money ever raised for a local election of any kind in the city’s history, according to the Whittier Daily News.
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Topics: | Community Impact
Posted by Al Norman on Thursday, September 14, 2006 | Permalink
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