IN CANADA, NAPANEE COUNCILS GIVES IN
Napanee council approves Wal-Mart expansion [Napanee Guide (Canada)]
After months of debate, Greater Napanee council, at their June 24 meeting, voted to approve an application by Wal-Mart and the developer of the site, Calloway REIT, to allow for a 40,000 square foot addition. The expansion has been a bone of contention with council and many members of the public since it was first proposed.
“The situation we’re in is that the arguments in favour of it were much better than the ones against it,” said Napanee chief administrative officer Ray Callery.
Callery was referring to the approval the application received from town planning officials and two private planning consultants, all of whom found that the expansion did not violate the town’s official plan.
Had council rejected the proposal, it likely would have been challenged by Wal-Mart and Calloway REIT before the Ontario Municipal Board (OMB). Given that Napanee’s own planning consultants approved of the plan, Callery said it would have been very difficult for the town to win before the OMB.
If the town had lost, there was a good chance Napanee would have to cover Wal-Mart and REIT Calloway’s costs. These might have run well over $100,000.
Several councillors noted that they were uncomfortable with the town’s position, saying they felt they had no choice but to approve the expansion, given the high costs associated with an OMB appeal.
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Topics: Traffic/Sprawl | Lawsuits | | Canada
Posted by Joel Nezianya on Monday, June 30, 2008 | Permalink
BATTLE RAGES ON IN TINLEY PARK, IL
Wal-Mart - the retailer you love to hate [South Town Star (Ill.)]
“Save money. Live better.”
That’s the slogan for Wal-Mart, the largest retailer in the world, which grossed $374.5 billion in sales last year.
But all Alberta Overocker sees from her Tinley Park back yard is a massive box of concrete proposed to replace the sprawling green and goldish sod farm just outside her gate.
“I understand progress has to be made,” Overocker, 73, said as she looked toward 83 acres slated for the retail giant. “I just don’t think a Wal-Mart is the answer.”
From Overocker’s back yard, vehicles buzzing up and down 191st Street and Harlem look like Matchbox cars. A Target and several restaurants in the Brookside Marketplace shopping center across 191st Street are small but visible. Progress is happening. Now Wal-Mart wants to bring it even closer to Overocker’s door.
Chicago-based Aetna Development wants to transform the southwest corner of busy 191st Street and Harlem Avenue into a 24-hour Wal-Mart Supercenter and more than a dozen other stores and restaurants, to be called Prairie View Crossings. Tinley Park has yet to approve the controversial project that has prompted a group of residents in the Brookside Glen subdivision to hire an attorney. But meetings continue as Aetna and Wal-Mart representatives revise their 370,000-square-foot plans to make residents and Tinley Park officials happy.
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Topics: Economic/Small Business | Environment | Traffic/Sprawl | Lawsuits |
Posted by Joel Nezianya on Monday, June 30, 2008 | Permalink
LOOKING AT WHAT’S BEST FOR ABINGDON, VA
Two SW Virginia Towns Have Different Views Of Wal-Mart [Bristol Herald Courier (Va.)]
Sixty miles away in Abingdon, Wal-Mart is the devil to many. Here, Wal-Mart is considered the savior.
“We’re anxiously waiting for Wal-Mart to get started here,” Grundy Mayor Roger Powers said. “I think the entire community is very excited about them coming.”
After flooding of the Levisa River – most notably in 1977 – washed away most of Grundy’s commerce, the town has undergone a state and federally funded flood-control project that means a clean slate.
A 13-acre piece of flat land that was once a mountainside will be the site of a new downtown.
After seven years of blasting and building, the town is on the verge of being officially flood-proof, and most of the commercial buildings that haven’t already been demolished will be soon.
For the creation of 21st-century Grundy, town officials are banking on the world’s largest retailer.“[With Wal-Mart] Grundy will once again be a vibrant retail center like it was prior to the ’77 flood,” Powers said. “Look at Claypool Hill and Bluefield, Va. – Bluefield, Va., was really dead, and now even their old downtown is really vibrant. Something attracted the people, and Wal-Mart brings a lot of people.”
A poster kept at Town Hall – now an office in an industrial shopping strip on U.S. Highway 460 – shows a centrally located Wal-Mart shopping center planned for the top of a two-story parking deck in the new town center, with other retail, residential and office space.
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Topics: Economic/Small Business | Environment | Site Fights & Local Ordinances | Traffic/Sprawl | Zoning Regulations |
Posted by Joel Nezianya on Monday, June 30, 2008 | Permalink
Wal-Mart Vs. Officer Jimmy Singleton
Wal-Mart is now fighting to keep disability benefits from non-employees and well as employees.
Former Pine Bluff Police Officer Jimmy Singleton was shot in the ankle and knocked unconscious from a blow to the head in 2003 while patting down a suspect. Today he suffers frequent migraines, and the bullet remains lodged in his ankle making it difficult to walk or stand up for long periods of time. For the past 4 years he’s been waging a nasty court battle to receive disability benefits.
So where does Wal-Mart come in? To flex it’s political and legal muscle, and push the Arkansas court to set a Wal-Mart-friendly precedent by denying him benefits. Both Wal-Mart and Tyson, Arkansas’ largest employers, “tendered friend-of-the-court briefs with the state Supreme Court this month arguing his claim should be denied.”
In addition to being completely shameless treatment of an officer wounded in the public service, this looks to be another horrible business decision for a company who continually struggles with its public image. We’ll see what happens when Wal-Mart’s PR people catch wind of this disaster-in-the-making.
*Jeff Hess Over at Writing on the Wal has a post up on the Singleton case as well.
Wal-Mart, Tyson Oppose Injured Officer’s Claim [NW Arkansas Morning News]:
Former Pine Bluff police officer Jimmy Singleton was patting down a suspect on March 1, 2003, when the man stuck a gun in his stomach.
Singleton received a gunshot wound to his left ankle and a blow to the head that knocked him unconscious in the ensuing struggle. He says he sustained neurological damage that affected his thinking and that he walks with a limp because of bullet fragments.
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Topics: Workers Rights & Wages | |
Posted by Eric Bull on Monday, June 30, 2008 | Permalink
RESIDENTS CONTINUE TO SPEAK OUT IN YUCCA VALLEY, CA
Reader’s letter: Store a threat to Yucca’s character [Hi-Desert Star (Calif.)]
If the proposed giant Wal-Mart comes to squat on our town it will be a very sad day for us. It will add one more blight to the landscape, more pollution and traffic to our streets and will be an ugly blow to the hopes that Yucca Valley will retain and build on its own special character.
China and the unimaginably wealthy Walton family will rejoice and the rest of us will have to take what is forced on us.
We hear about the sales tax money that would go to our town, but sales tax money can also be made by a variety of local businesses whose owners live and spend here.
Local businesses have much to do with the character of modest-sized towns, businesses that have zero hope of surviving competition with the behemoth. Even our supermarket chains will be vulnerable. They can be undercut until they fail, depriving all of us of the competition and variety we now enjoy, as well as freedom of choice. Currently, if you shop the sales you’re already getting Wal-Mart prices, sometimes better.
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Topics: Economic/Small Business | Environment | Traffic/Sprawl |
Posted by Joel Nezianya on Monday, June 30, 2008 | Permalink
Anchorage, AK Wal-Mart Tries Again On Smaller Site
In October of 2006, the Assembly in Anchorage, Alaska voted 8-2 to overturn a decision from its own Planning Commission that rejected a proposed Wal-Mart supercenter and a Sam’s Club on a parcel of 53 acres along Muldoon road. The Assembly unfroze the Wal-Mart project. Even by Alaska standards, this project was huge: a 228,000 s.f. supercenter and a 149,000 s.f. Sam’s Club. “This is a far better deal,” one assemblyman said at the time, “than anything that would happen should we say no.” More than 60% of the land Wal-Mart wanted was zoned for industry, which would have allowed a big box store---but a piece of the land was zoned for residential use---so the Assembly had to rezone that portion. Wal-Mart and city officials made a deal that they would rezone the land if Wal-Mart would “dress up” the façade of the store, and give some land to the city for a park. Wal-Mart also was asked to construct a road with sidewalks, and other amenities---all bartered in exchange for a rezoning approval.
Assembly members justified this deal by saying that if Wal-Mart was not allowed to build, the industrial land could end up being something worse---like an asphalt plant. “Boy, we’d hear from it then, wouldn’t we?” an Assemblyman told the Anchorage Daily News. But one Assembly member rejected the deal, saying, “The road work and the pocket park are not worth the harm of the rezone to this neighborhood.”
Local residents in the Northeast Community Council also testified against it. “The process has been bought by Wal-Mart,” a member of the Community Council told the newspaper. The retailer promised the Assembly that their Wal-Mart was going to be ‘among the nicest in the country.’ “It’s going to be right up there,” said Wal-Mart’s marketing manager. “It’s going to be a beautiful store.” When the store was approved in the fall of 2006, the company said construction would begin sometime in 2008. But they were wrong. The head of a local union filed a lawsuit against the City in January of 2007.
Wally Stuart, president of United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1496, said in his lawsuit that one Assembly member had a ‘substantial financial interest’ in the zoning change and should have been recused from the vote.
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Topics: Ballot Measures | Organizing | Zoning Regulations
Posted by Al Norman on Monday, June 30, 2008 | Permalink
Brookhaven, NY. Wal-Mart Supercenter Plan Stalled By Litigation
On March 20, 2008, Sprawl-Busters reported that homeowners in Rocky Point, Long Island, one of the 51 hamlets of Brookhaven, New York, have been fighting big box stores for 8 years. But a developer was trying to pull a bait and switch between a Lowe’s project---which got mired in litigation---and a Wal-Mart supercenter.
Brookhaven already has six Wal-Marts within 20 miles---but none of them are supercenters. Brookhaven has 323.5 square miles or area, and is the third largest Town in New York State. It’s located in Central Suffolk County, Long Island. Rocky Point is located on the northern edge of Brookhaven, on the banks of Long Island Sound East. The north and south shores of Brookhaven are tall timber areas, covered with oak and maple. The middle section is called the “Pine Barrens,” with stands of scrub oak and scrub pine---an important area for replenishing the town’s water supply. For years, this hamlet did battle against a Lowe’s Home Improvement store. A developer called Lerner-Heidenberg Properties, from New Jersey, tried to squeeze in a 169,000 s.f. Lowe’s on Route 25A on roughly 18 acres of land. For many years, the site was used as a drive-in movie theater, but it has been shut down for years, and represents one of the larger pieces of open land in Brookhaven. But instead of building a store, Lerner-Heidenberg ended up generating a lawsuit, which went all the way to the State Supreme Court.
Lerner-Heidenberg first proposed their Lowe’s project in 2000, but when the town rezoned the land, the developer filed a lawsuit in 2002, charging that Brookhaven had intentionally put off voting on the site plan so that the land could be rezoned. The State Supreme Court ruled that Brookhaven acted legally---but the developer pressed his case onward to the Appellate Court, and in February of 2007, that court ruled that there must be a trial in the case. This meant that Brookhaven had to spend a considerable amount of time and money just to defend its rezoning. Knowing this, Lerner-Heidenberg approached the town with a settlement idea: drop the 169,000 s.f. Lowe’s, and replace it with a 135,000 s.f. Wal-Mart. The developer promised that if the town accepted the Wal-Mart deal, he would drop their lawsuit.
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Topics: Community Impact | Economic/Small Business | Traffic/Sprawl | Zoning Regulations
Posted by Al Norman on Monday, June 30, 2008 | Permalink
WAL-MART WANTS TO FILL IN MORE WETLANDS IN TARPON SPRINGS, FL
Wal-Mart seeks new permit [St. Petersburg Times (Fla.)]
So, what’s Wal-Mart’s next move?
By all indications, it’s full speed ahead.
Company officials confirmed Thursday they’re moving forward with plans to build a Supercenter on the Anclote River.
“This is a site we continue to work on. There’s no change in its status,” said Wal-Mart spokeswoman Quenta Vettel.
Earlier this year, it appeared Wal-Mart had hit another roadblock in its four-year battle to build the store, when the city’s Board of Adjustment ruled that changes to the company’s site plan constituted major modifications. That meant Wal-Mart would have to go through more public hearings to gain approval.
Now, it looks like that’s exactly what the company is prepared to do.
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Topics: Environment |
Posted by Joel Nezianya on Friday, June 27, 2008 | Permalink
