[Mpls] Wal-Mart Comes to Northeast Mpls?

[Gayle Bonneville]

Wal-Mart is now making its move on Minneapolis, and I can only hope that our
city council and mayor have the backbone to stand up to this outfit.

It looks like the  corporation well known for its disreputable practices
will, under the banner of Sam's Club, be asking the Minneapolis City
Council's Zoning and Planning Committee this Thursday to twist, turn and
mangle our zoning ordinance in order to shoehorn this retail store, liquor
store and "automobile convenience facility" into 135,000 sq. feet of
northeast Minneapolis and force it onto Broadway Street. Apparently this
will be a nice companion to the new Wal-Mart being built in St. Anthony
Village a mile or two north.

Wal-Mart/Sam's Club will be asking the city council members on the committee
to override city planning staff, the city zoning administrator and the Board
of Adjustment, who all said the retail piece is not allowed within the
current zoning.  That alone ought to be enough to kill this proposal. But my
Ward I council member, quoted in the Board of Adjustment transcript, sounds
less like the community leader/advocate I thought we elected and more like a
municipal attorney slicing and dicing, parsing and spinning the finer points
of interpretation in an effort to allow this distasteful behemoth into
Minneapolis. While I don't advocate that the city council throw out the
ordinance books and act on whim, I do hope they use this instance (where
thus far, city staff interpretation looks like it should easily allow them
to say no to Wal-Mart/Sam) to demonstrate some vision and leadership like
that shown by other cities around the country when dealing with this
corporation and other Big Boxes -- in case Wal-Mart/Sam's simply ends up
searching for another Minneapolis site nearby.

It's already been discussed here how square footage and other
land-use/planning tools can be used to deal with these issues, so I won't
repeat that. The history-making huge discrimination lawsuit, abusive labor
practices and lost revenues have been well reported. However, I found it
interesting that part of the sales pitch from the Wal-Mart/Sam's attorney,
according to the transcript, was that Minneapolis zoning ordinance "is
designed to promote, protect, I am going to excerpt part of it, 'economic
viability and general welfare of the city, promote the orderly and
beneficial development of the areas, including industrial in the city'....We
think the presence of Sam's Club would be a substantial convenience and
amenity for many of the businesses...." Wow. Research on this corporation
says that not only do taxpayers have to fork over subsidies to its low-paid
workers in the form of government social services, but small businesses
suffer or disappear when Wal-Marts move in. And the product mix and target
market for this proposed Sam's Club may have a negative impact on even the
existing larger businesses at the nearby Quarry -- such as Target, Office
Max, Home Depot, Party City, Rainbow -- since Sam's is aiming a lot of its
effort at attracting small businesses as customers.

The Wal-Mart/Sam's attorney was also quoted as saying, "...this thing
doesn't fit necessarily in any particular district...." He's right -- it
doesn't belong in this district or any other district in Minneapolis. We
need to look beyond "my" cheap toilet paper and focus on "our" big-picture
consequences of what it means to have Wal-Mart/Sam's here.

Gayle Bonneville
Northeast Minneapolis resident