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Examples & Resources

• Greenfield, MA stops Wal-Mart rezoning
• Lorain, OH Measure (2005)
• Agawam, MA Pavilion Plan (2006)
• San Marcos, CA Proposition G
• View All

To stop a Wal-Mart from coming to your town, you will need to engage in political organizing. If your Planning Board or City Council is not in your corner, you must get public opinion on your side to help win them over. If local officials see that there is a strong and vocal constituency that wants more zoning protections, they will be more responsive to your opinions.

To beat a Wal-Mart proposal, you need to aggressively develop the following strategies:

Form A Citizens’ Group

It takes a village to beat a Wal-Mart—but that village starts with one person who is upset.

You need a vehicle locally to get your anti Wal-Mart message out to the public. If there is no existing local neighborhood association or citizen’s group already up and running, create a new one that is as broad-based as possible. Include neighbors, clergy, educators, union members, retirees, former public officials, merchants, etc. You don’t need to have non-profit status, just go to the local bank, open up an account and get an IRS number for the bank account, then begin soliciting donations. Your core group can do well with as few as 12 people. This steering group needs to meet at least weekly during a campaign. The larger group can meet less often, but should be connected by email status reports weekly. Give your new group an upbeat name like "Ourtown First", which means the homeowners, taxpayers, citizens of Ourtown come first, the out-of-town developers and their out-of-town corporate retailers come a distant second. Your group should begin meeting in living rooms, not in public settings. You need to be able to talk strategy in a private way.

Raising Money

Your citizen’s group should set up a separate fundraising committee to focus exclusively on raising money. You will need to raise at least $15,000 to start, which will allow you to retain a land use attorney, consider other experts, and begin to think about visibility expenses (lawn signs, radio spots, etc). To ask for this money, you should prepare a one page budget that spells out exactly what you need, then go to your local business community and ask for 15 businesses to become "sustaining supporters" of your effort at $1,000 each. Unless you are involved in a ballot campaign, such contributions do not
have to be publicly reported. Check in your local directory to see if you have a local union branch of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). Sit down with them and talk about what kind of resources you need. Avoid getting bogged down in labor-intensive events like tag sales or spaghetti suppers. Such events are great for expanding your email alert list, but will not raise the kind of money you need to fight Wal-Mart. Let your local media know that you are raising money, but that you expect Wal-Mart to outspend you by ten- or twenty-fold. Use the media to drive home the point your citizen’s group is at a major disadvantage financially when taking on Wal-Mart--but you have on thing Wal-Mart doesn’t have: local residents who care about your town’s future.

Create A Fact Sheet / Website

Produce a one or two sided "Frequently Asked Questions" literature piece about the Wal- Mart plan in your community that you can use as a mailer, or a handout, that boils down your specific arguments to a few talking points. Do the same on the internet. Create a website, with a blog, that lays out your basic issues in short, easy to read statements. Focus mainly on why this plan, in this place, is wrong, and why local officials should vote it down. Gather quotes from local opinion-makers about why this proposal is a bad fit for your town. Compare the size of the proposed store to your downtown area. Quote your town’s Comprehensive Land Use Plan.

Present An Alternative

Wal-Mart will start a pro-development group in your community, and one of the first things they will accuse you of is being anti-business and anti-growth. For this reason, it is important in every zoning proposal to illustrate not only what you don’t want, but what you want. Explain what you would rather see happen with this site. Develop an alternative vision of what a project on this property could look like. Ask a local architect to draw up a smaller, mixed-use project of office space, housing, and neighborhood retail, to show citizens that being anti-Wal-Mart does not mean being anti-growth. If you can find a developer who’s willing to make an offer on the land, so much the better. When Wal-Mart tried to build on the boyhood home of George Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia, local residents presented the alternative vision of redeveloping the historic site, and convinced a private foundation to raise the funds necessary to buy Wal-Mart out.

Visibility in the Media—Always

A Wal-Mart battle is a campaign, and you have to keep on winning every day of that campaign. If you can shape public opinion, you can win the battle. Begin immediately by generating a large volume of letters to the editor. A subcommittee of your citizen’s group should concentrate on linking people willing to send letters with prepared letters that they can edit and email. Any time there is a story in the press about Wal-Mart, use that story as an opportunity to send in another half dozen letters. Look also to create press releases for your group at every turn. Create events, like inviting Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott to come to your community for 24 hours. Offer to pay for his bed and breakfast, because you know in 24 hours or less you can convince him that your town is an awful location for another supercenter. If any given story in the paper mentions only pro Wal-Mart opinions, ask for equal time to get out the "other side of the Wal." Look to create your own media as well, such as your cable TV show for rebroadcast, or your newsprint tabloid for insertion in the regular paper, and your website. Be visible as often as you can in the media, on whatever pretext you can create. See Campaign Guide from Greenfield, Massachusetts for sample ads.

Lobby Your Local Officials

In the end, it all comes down to votes. It might be a Planning Board, it might be a City Council--but it comes down to winning a vote. A Wal-Mart campaign means winning a majority of votes on your council. Begin immediately to scope out who makes the land use decision, and how are they likely to vote, and what is the timeline for your campaign. If you have a planning board of 7 people, you need to win over 4 of them. So who are the most likely 4, and what do you know about them? Who has their ear, who is part of their support network? Who influences them? If your group is friends with any of these officials, sit down and talk strategy privately with your allies. Mobilize letter writing to those on the board or the city council, whoever makes the final call. Never threaten or intimidate elected or appointed officials--you can leave those tactics to Wal-Mart. But have different people in your group "adopt" members of the planning board to make sure they are getting lots of good mail and encouragement to vote Wal-Mart down. Because elected officials behave differently when they know they’re being watched, always get your troops out to every public meeting, and pack the place until the bitter end. It ain’t over until the fat company sings. Keep your focus on Wal-Mart--always--and avoid temptations to waste energy complaining about local officials, the newspaper, etc. Make Wal-Mart your only target.