Wal-Mart Plans Raise Hackles
Critics Claim Santa Fe 'Super Center' Would Harm Local Economy
The New Mexican - April 10, 2005
By Bob Quick

A plan to build a new Wal-Mart "super center" on the city's southwest side has raised concerns with the Santa Fe Business Alliance, which supports locally owned businesses, and others, who also see "big-box" stores as a threat to the community's economic vitality .

"We're not against the new Wal-Mart, but we do have some questions as to what the real costs are long term for Santa Fe when mega-stores are allowed to come in and do what they do," said David Kaseman, head of the Santa Fe Business Alliance. "Basically, they draw a lot of dollars out of the economy very rapidly, and that causes quite a problem locally."

The Wal-Mart "super center," 150,000 square feet in size, will be in the planned Entrada Contenta, a commercial development with a total of 300,000 square feet of space.

It will be built on 35 acres of land near the intersection of Cerrillos and Ocate roads.

The center connects on its northeast side with the planned third phase of Tierra Contenta, a residential development that consists of about 1,500 homes. Almost 4,000 homes will be there by the time Tierra Contenta is built out.

The Santa Fe representatives of the two Arizona developers of Entrada Contenta, Richard Gorman and Tom Keesing, said the new Wal-Mart will bring with it hundreds of jobs and pour as much as $6 million per year in new gross-receipts taxes into city coffers.

The store will be built on land owned by Herrera and Associates, consisting of members of the Herrera family of Santa Fe. Dr. William Herrera, a retired dentist, is managing partner of the firm.

The new Wal-Mart store, which is about the same size as the Wal-Mart in Española, "will have a grocery component and other conveniences that include a garden center, gasoline and a drive-through pharmacy," said Wal-Mart spokeswoman Kimberly Randle.

Randle also said that the opening of the new Wal-Mart will not mean the closing of the existing Wal-Mart, which is at 3251 Cerrillos Road. Wal-Mart originally opened in Santa Fe in 1985.

Wal-Mart has closed hundreds of older stores around the country, leaving many of them vacant for years and harming local economies, according to Sprawl Busters, an anti-Wal-Mart Web site run by Al Norman. He's based in his home town of Greenfield, Mass.

In a telephone interview, Norman said there were 356 "dead stores," as Wal-Mart Realty calls them, at the end of March, with at least one-third of them on a list that dates back to 1992.

"About a third of them are larger than 100,000 square feet," Norman said, adding that if the empty stores and their parking lots are counted together, the amount of unused space comes to 52 million square feet, or 1,000 football fields.

Norman suspects the existing Santa Fe Wal-Mart store will be shut down, no matter what the company says now. "They've been systematically shutting down stores since the early 1990s," he said "They're the king of dead air."

Randle denied here is a plan to close the store. She said Wal-Mart is "responding to shopping patterns" in opening the new Santa Fe store and plans to keep the old one open.

Kaseman added: "I question what will happen to the old Wal-Mart (in Santa Fe.) It's not been their history elsewhere (to leave older stores open.) Those are the type of things that change down the road."

Kaseman also pointed out that Wal-Mart has a history of coming into a community with low prices, driving existing stores out of business and then raising prices when there's no more competition.

"I saw that happen in East Texas," he said. "When Wal-Mart first came in, they helped the tax base pretty dramatically, but slowly the whole region was marginalized. The dollars didn't stay there -- it wasn't a sustainable model."

Kaseman also mentioned the treatment of big-box stores in Bozeman, Mont., which has a moratorium on any store bigger than 75,000 square feet in size.

The only way retailers can exceed the limit is to negotiate special terms with the city, as Home Depot and Wal-Mart have done, putting up a combined $950,000 to offset potential economic damage to the local economy.

Bozeman "used $25,000 (of the amount paid by the large retailers) to start a business alliance," Kaseman said. "The emphasis was on the importance of keeping money local."

Kaseman also spoke in favor of a study to determine the long-term cost of a Wal-Mart moving to town, one that would consider the effect of the store on job quality, the environment, roads and traffic.

Santa Fe city councilors are eventually expected to consider Wal-Mart's application for a second Santa Fe store, but at this time the request is considered a land-use case.

"We're not supposed to discuss it before it comes before us," said Councilor Karen Heldmeyer. "It's considered a quasi-judicial matter."

Heldmeyer said she has received e-mails from constituents and others concerned about a larger Wal-Mart, including one from Shonie Neal, who works for the Santa Fe Railyard Corp.

"I just feel it's a detriment to local businesses who don't need that kind of presence in our community," Neal said. "Wal-Mart in my opinion more than most businesses tends to be predatory toward small, local businesses."

Patricia d'Andrea, a retired writer and editor, said she works with the Santa Fe Business Alliance and is against the city's encouraging "big-box developments" to come to town.

"The center of the city moves to the big boxes, and we've already seen what it'd done to the Plaza," she said. "For me, that's a very sad thing."

Wal-Mart also engages in "predatory pricing," d'Andrea said, "and refuses to be unionized."

Margo Covington, chair of the Sustainable Commission, said her organization hasn't taken a position on Wal-Mart's new store.

On a personal level, however, Covington said she prefers supporting locally owned businesses, which help preserve "the cultural identity of our community and our City Different-ness."

She added: "Studies show local businesses pay higher wages and care more about their employees because it's their neighbors they're hiring."

Another Santa Fean disaffected with Wal-Mart is Juan Velasco, who worked in the state Economic Development Department in the Toney Anaya administration in the early 1980s.

Velasco worked closely with Sam Walton, Wal-Mart's founder, to bring the chain stores to New Mexico. He was particularly impressed with the store's emphasis on selling American-made products.

"That's all gone out the window," Velasco said. "They're the biggest importer of Chinese products in the world."

Wal-Mart has run into opposition around the country in its drive to open new stores. In Maryland, according to a recent article in The Washington Post, legislators approved a bill that would force organizations with 10,000 or more employees to spend at least 8 percent of their payroll on health benefits or put the funds into health-care programs for the poor.

Wal-Mart also dropped plans to build stores in New York City, Chicago and Inglewood, Calif.

In Inglewood, the Coalition for a Better Inglewood sent a letter to Lee Scott, Wal-Mart's CEO, expressing concern about the "unmitigated impacts" of a new Wal-Mart store, including "increased crime, traffic, noise and pollution."

The coalition is demanding that Wal-Mart accept a community benefits agreement that calls for, among other things, living-wage jobs, affordable health insurance, job training and basic rights on the job.

Information from The Associated Press was used in this story.