When giant Wal-Mart knocks, there's a town battle in store

Political apathy has a way of vanishing when Wal-Mart says it wants to be your neighbor.

As the world's largest retailer ramps up its presence in Western Washington, bands of residents in three Puget Sound cities — Covington; Lacey, Thurston County; and Lakewood, Pierce County — have mobilized against Wal-Mart's plans to build big-box stores in their neighborhoods.

Fears of swelling traffic, sinking property values and the squeezing out of mom-and-pop retailers have sparked blunt, sometimes raucous exchanges at public meetings in recent months. Similar scenes are playing out across America, feeding a growing subculture of Web sites and books that offer neighborhood activists tips on how to fight Wal-Mart, Home Depot and other mammoth retailers.

Yet as neighbors wage battle with Wal-Mart in Washington and beyond, the Bentonville, Ark.-based company keeps ringing up record sales; last year, it raked in nearly $218 billion. The company's staunch supporters say they welcome the selection of goods, hundreds of jobs and extra tax revenue that a new store brings.

So the debate continues in city halls around the country, underscoring the fickle place Wal-Mart occupies in the American psyche. No company inspires more angst or admiration, and those feelings often lead to emotional, messy public squabbles.

"It can divide communities over whether to allow them in or not," said political satirist Al Franken, who recently co-wrote a screenplay about a town's struggles with a fictional Wal-Mart. "The whole argument for fighting them is to keep your community, and ironically the whole thing can divide it."

Welcome mat is not out

Contentious public hearings are nothing new for Wal-Mart. Last year, it opened 102 U.S. stores and 25 Sam's Club warehouses. With every new project, the company must clear the red tape of local government, inevitably leading to encounters with residents who don't want Wal-Mart in their back yard.

But the company's reception in the Puget Sound area has been particularly acrimonious of late.

Earlier this year, at an open house in a junior-high cafeteria, Covington residents jeered Wal-Mart representatives as they described plans for a 134,000-square-foot store, interrupting their presentation and peppering them with questions about traffic and neighborhood impacts.

Several people stormed out of the meeting, and the South County Journal later scolded residents in an editorial for their "boorish behavior." The matter is expected to go before a hearing examiner in September.

In April, Lacey City Council members rejected Wal-Mart's proposal to build a 149,000-square-foot store as part of a new development off Yelm Highway in north Thurston County, saying the project didn't fit in with the city's plans to create a residential and retail "village center."

Wal-Mart, which spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on a customized design for the store, has sued the city in Thurston County Superior Court. A court date is scheduled for mid-September.

And in Lakewood, some people are crying foul over Wal-Mart's plans to build a 150,000-square-foot store that could one day expand into a grocery-selling supercenter. The project is going through the permit process and will likely be the subject of a public hearing this fall.

On top of the usual concerns about traffic and neighborhood disruptions, the Tahoma Audubon Society has objected to the Lakewood project on grounds that it would harm wildlife habitat and wetlands on the site.

"We're prepared to go to the mat on this," said Bob Warfield, a Lakewood resident and co-organizer of a neighborhood group that is pressing the company to choose another site for the store.

In taking on Wal-Mart, some local activists have invoked the example of Gig Harbor, which drew national attention in 1996, when heated community opposition prompted the company to abandon its plans to build a store in the sleepy waterfront town.

Others have looked to a burgeoning network of anti-big-box activism for guidance. In the early stages of his group's opposition campaign, Bob Nelson of the Covington Neighbors Council read "How Wal-Mart Is Destroying America and The World and What You Can Do About It" by Bill Quinn, which is Amazon.com's top-selling book on Wal-Mart. The book accuses Wal-Mart of bullying its vendors and workers and driving out small businesses.

"If 25 percent of what's in that book is true, no one should want Wal-Mart in their neighborhood," said Nelson, whose group collected 1,300 signatures on a petition opposing the new store.

Following growth

Wal-Mart's mantra for expansion is to follow growth, to build where the people are. Given that logic, company representatives say the towns selected for new Wal-Marts often are already simmering with anti-growth sentiment.

"We're coming into communities that are maybe suffering some growing pains in the first place," said Amy Hill, Wal-Mart's community-affairs manager for the West region. "And we have the potential for being a catalyst."

As a pre-emptive move, Wal-Mart routinely mails fliers to residents to ask for their feedback on a proposed store and to tout its contributions to the community.

The company employs more than 10,000 workers in Washington state and has collected more than $100 million in sales taxes since opening its first store in Omak in 1993. Last year, the company gave $1.8 million to community causes in the state.

But Wal-Mart's primary appeal lies in its convenience and bargains. Jennifer Torres of Enumclaw said she "can't wait" for Wal-Mart's new store in Bonney Lake to open this fall. At least once a week, Torres makes the half-hour trip to the Auburn Wal-Mart with her two young sons — Alex, 4, and Johnathan, who will soon turn 2 — to stock up on clothes, movies and other items. The Bonney Lake store will be just a 15-minute drive.

"It's got practically everything I want, and the prices are cheap," Torres said as she and her boys combed the aisles. "You can feed the kids lunch and then go shopping. Their diapers are the cheapest I've found."

Wal-Mart says it doesn't obliterate mom-and-pops in the towns where it opens, saying its stores become a regional economic draw that benefits the town as a whole. And a company-commissioned study of real-estate prices near three stores in the Phoenix area found that home values actually jumped the year after Wal-Mart opened.

Lacey City Councilman John Darby, who lives less than a mile from the proposed Yelm Highway store, was one of two council members who voted to approve that Wal-Mart. The company, in designing its store, made a special effort to cater to the needs of the community, Darby said, adding that a second Wal-Mart would be an economic boon for the city.

"When the city of Lacey is projecting an operating deficit in 2006, do I think $500,000 in sales taxes a good thing? Absolutely," said Darby, who also is an executive with the Olympia/Thurston County Chamber of Commerce.

As Wal-Mart sees it, the silent majority of residents support new stores coming to their neighborhood. In Covington, a town of just under 14,000 people, Wal-Mart received 1,000 responses to survey cards asking for residents' opinions on the proposed store there. Of those, 730 replies were positive, 180 were negative, and the rest gave neutral responses, Hill said.

"You frequently see that people opposed to a project seem to talk the loudest," she said. "There may be some pretty loud, vocal opponents, but there's also lots of people supporting these projects. We wouldn't be so successful if there wasn't a need for these stores."

A matter of size

Dana Frank, a history professor at the University of California-Santa Cruz who has researched Wal-Mart's impact on U.S. culture, said Wal-Mart strikes a nerve with Americans because of "the sheer, almost monopoly scale" the company has in many communities.

"It's already scary the extent to which you can drive all around the country and see the same retail strips," Frank said. "I think people are responding to that."

Frank said residents' often vehement reactions to Wal-Mart stem from fears that their neighborhood will lose its distinctiveness.

"It's about what kind of community you want to want to live in — whether there's a corner store, a neighborhood tire store or a neighborhood grocery store," Frank said. "If they're going to wipe out the tire stores and grocery stores, what's going to be left? Wal-Mart and houses."

The often shrill debate over whether to allow Wal-Mart and other big-box titans into a community inspired Franken and producer John Markus to write a screenplay, "Halstad," a comedy that pokes fun at all sides of a small-town controversy that gets out of hand.

As the three disputes over Wal-Mart continue around Puget Sound, it's a good bet all sides are hoping for a better outcome than that in Franken's screenplay, which ends with the new store burning down.

"It's sort of an accident," Franken explained wryly. "But the volunteer fire department doesn't do anything to stop it."

Jake Batsell: 206-464-2718 or jbatsell@seattletimes.com