According to WLOX TV in Biloxi, Mississippi, the city council in Biloxi on October 28th. refused for a second time a Wal-Mart rezoning proposal. Even after the developer pitched in a golf course, the Council found the proposal sub-par. The developer promised the city it would donate the Broadwater golf course, but the rezoning failed on a 3-3 vote. The Council one week earlier had voted unanimously to reject the plan. “The problem is not the city’s mission to save a golf course. It’s the city’s job to be sure that traffic access and traffic capacity is sufficient to handle traffic generated by Super Wal Mart,” council president, Jim Compton was quoted saying by WLOX.
“You’ve got a bunch of smoke and mirrors,” Compton told the developer. “That you might have this, you might have that. You’ve talked to that, talked to this. You don’t have anything. You can’t sign anything right now promising a golf course will be donated to the city, can you?” With one Council member absent, the project failed to get the 4 votes it needed to prevail. “I just don’t understand when we offered everything, and the city, the council, still feels that it’s not adequate. So, we don’t know,” the developer told the TV station. Any revised Wal Mart project will have to start the whole process from scratch.
Over the years, I’ve seen developers and retailers offer communities a virtual candy store of “deal sweetners”. I wrote about such offers in my 1999 book, “Slam Dunking Wal-Mart.” This is the first golf course sweetener I’ve seen, and it failed to make the course in Biloxi. Try searching this database by “sweeteners” to see stories of a similar nature, or call 1-877 DUNK WAL to order “Slam Dunking Wal-Mart.”
