You’ve just made all of your constituents poorer because you’re beholden to the UFCW.  Here’s the LA Times (Jan 30, 2004) commentary on your actions:

A city ordinance can keep Wal-Mart from opening in Los Angeles, but it will not stop residents from shopping at Wal-Mart. If kept from locating in Los Angeles, Wal-Mart will consider locations in neighboring areas on the edges of the city. As Los Angeles residents shift their spending to Wal-Mart, city tax revenues will be reduced.

There is tremendous irony in this. Los Angeles, which for years has begged regional supermarkets to locate in areas such as South Central, would ban superstores in the very areas that need them the most. According to an aide to Garcetti, the concern is that a superstore would put existing retail economic development investments at risk. So, in a most bizarre turn of events, the economic development bureaucracy opposes economic development.

If the ordinance passes in February, as expected, it will deprive poor neighborhoods of convenient, low-price shopping and entry-level jobs. Poor communities would remain saddled with ineffective revitalization efforts rather than the market-driven redevelopment that would follow the opening of a Wal-Mart.

Once Wal-Mart has located its new stores elsewhere, it will be too late to do something about making up the lost revenue. Los Angeles, in particular, is giving up a tremendous opportunity to revitalize poor neighborhoods.

How much, exactly, did the UFCW contribute to your campaign?

Steve in New England, as Councilman Garcetti’s post points out, a thorough study of big-box retailers and their effects on local government was carried out. This study showed that big-box retailers have a negative economic impact on both local governments and workers in these stores.

With this in mind, I think that your association of big-box retailers with “economic development” (typically a term for positive economic growth) is a false one.

Market-driven development does not neccessarily equal a positive social or financial outcome. Government has a role to play in facilitating a marketplace, especially when it acts to protect its best interests.

No matter how much I would like to patronize any given big-box establishment, there’s no way, I’d give one carte-blanche in my community to develop however they’d like without local approval, without any regard to community or environmental impacts, and with immunity from any local oversight.  This is what Wal-Mart thought it could get from Inglewood just because we are a City with significant minority population and low-income residents.  If Walmart wants to do business here, it’ll have to follow the same rules we we apply to any other corporation wanting to develop here.  If not, they are not welcome.

Corvallis has the same myopic, shaft the shoppers attitude as Eric Garcetti.  As a result, our economy is stagnant, our shopping choices limited, and our cost of living higher than if we had an open, democratic local economy.

I despise the arrogant, over-reaching exclusionary tactics of entrenched power elites.  The anti-Walmart prejudice springs from the same wellspring of hatred and bias that gave rise to anti-Semitism in Germany and the racist whites-only signs in the old South.

As we become less competitive in the new global economy, we can put some of the blame on our political operatives.

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