Wal-Mart battles rage

Laura McAloon has heard a lot about Wal-Mart. As the attorney for the city of Pullman, she sat through three days of testimony for and against a proposed supercenter there. At the end of the public hearings, McAloon drove home to attend a contentious traffic meeting for a proposed 186,000-square-foot Wal-Mart in her own south Spokane neighborhood.

“The same emotion and the same feelings were expressed in both proceedings,” McAloon said, adding, “Wal-Mart triggers a lot of emotion.”

Bentonville, Ark.-based Wal-Mart Stores Inc. hopes to build supercenters in south Spokane, Pullman and Hayden, along with a Sam’s Club in north Spokane. While some shoppers hail the bargain-hunting opportunities, others oppose the projects, citing concerns ranging from heavy traffic to the destruction of decent-paying jobs.

Jennifer Holder, a Seattle-based Wal-Mart spokeswoman, said the two proposed Spokane stores would create a total of about 400 jobs. Another benefit, she said, is that each store would pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in property taxes and several hundred thousand more in annual sales taxes.

But Brad Read, a South Hill resident and Rogers High School teacher, spoke out at a recent meeting, encouraging people to band together against both proposed stores in Spokane.

He said Wal-Mart stores lower a community’s standard of living by driving better-paying companies out of business. That, Read said, is particularly hard on a neighborhood like Hillyard, which is near the planned Sam’s Club.

“It’s a matter of decreasing living-wage jobs, which Wal-Mart never provides,” Read said.

Spokane developer Harlan Douglass owns land at Lincoln Road and Nevada Street, where the 153,000-square-foot Sam’s Club is planned. He also owns the 44th Avenue and Regal property being considered for an elevated supercenter with parking on the roof and under the store.

Lois Strand, who lives near the planned Sam’s Club, plans to attend an upcoming traffic impact meeting on Feb. 7 at 6 p.m. at Garry Middle School, but fears the store will go in anyway. “We knew something was going to happen (there) but I never imagined it was going to be a Sam’s Club,” Strand said.

The city of Spokane has received a building permit application for the Sam’s Club and a request to subdivide the Douglass property on Regal.

Leroy Eadie, of the city’s planning services department, said permit applications and store plans are scrutinized by engineers and specialists in a half-dozen departments, which can take weeks to months.

“The part of this that will most likely come into play is SEPA,” Eadie said, referring to the State Environmental Policy Act checklist.

A Department of Ecology spokeswoman said the agency will also examine what appears to be a wetland on the South Hill property.

The land is thought to contain a shallow flood plain, which could also present development challenges.

In Pullman, a citizen group called Pullman Alliance for Responsible Development appealed a 223,000-square-foot store. Wal-Mart announced plans to build the store, which would be Pullman’s first Wal-Mart and largest retailer, last March.”We received a huge volume of written comments during the 14-day SEPA process,” said McAloon, the city attorney. The hearing examiner is expected to rule on the project within two weeks.

The scale of the project took the community —which isn’t accustomed to big-box retailers — by surprise, McAloon said.

The community reaction to the project has prompted her to recommend changes to city laws to allow citizens to testify at public hearings earlier in the planning process.

Plans for a Wal-Mart superstore in Hayden, Idaho, surfaced in fall of 2002. Initially, Wal-Mart wanted the city to amend its comprehensive plan, which governs land-use decisions, to allow it to build on land that was zoned for both commercial use and housing. The city council refused after hearing from hundreds of citizens who opposed the change.

So Wal-Mart found an adjacent property, but balked when asked to subdivide the property. In the end, Wal-Mart attorneys threatened to sue the town of 13,000.

Lisa Key, director of planning and community development for Hayden, said the developer’s engineers, CLC Associates, have sought feedback from the city on recommendations for the congested roadways near Wal-Mart’s proposed construction site, Honeysuckle Avenue and U.S. Highway 95. Recommendations include adding lanes and street lights and widening intersections. The company is also asked to move a nearby sewer lift station at an estimated cost of $500,000.

“My interpretation is they’re evaluating whether or not they want to move forward with this,” Key said.