When Wal-Mart wants to use the ballot box to try and get a rezoning, they support the referendum process.But when citizen’s use the same process, Wal-Mart tries to block it. We reported on 3/15/00 from Mesa, Arizona that citizens had collected more than twice the necessary signatures to place a rezoning issue on the ballot this Fall to overturn a City Council decision last February to permit a 224,000 Wal-Mart supercenter. A group called the Northeast Mesa Residents for Responsible Growth, has put the issue on the ballot. But Wal-Mart has filed a legal complaint to try and disqualify the petitions. Wal-Mart claims that the petitions should not have been approved by the city, because voters were not given a written description of the property to look at. But City Attorney Neal Beets fired off a 6 page letter to Wal-Mart noting that state law requires a “legal description” of the property be part of the petition, and that residents provided voters with something even better: a map of the land in question. The city attorney told Wal-Mart that the map was superior to a narrative, word-based description in real estate legalese. “I’m sure that Wal-Mart prefers that petition signers knew more about its proposed location through the opportunity to look at a map attached to the zoning ordinance and referendum, rather than knowing less about the location of the project through a solely narrative and highly technical form of legal description that…would be decidedly unhelpful to potential petition signers.” On the othe hand, maybe Wal-Mart DID want people to know less about their plans.
Wal-Mart keeps boasting that it has “done surveys” and is “very confident we could win an election in Mesa.” Yet Wal-Mart doesn’t want this to get to the referendum stage. Could it be that Wal-Mart is thinking about the quarter of a million dollars it might have to spend on the election to remain confident? According to Wal-Mart, they aren’t thinking of the fortuen THEY will have to pour into a Mesa campaign, but rather the much smaller sum of money it would cost the town to hold the election. “Mesa taxpayers shouldn’t have to pay for an election,” Wal-Mart explains. “If it means we’re looking at a legal challenge in order to save taxpayers election costs, then that’s how we’ll proceed.” Does Wal-Mart REALLY believe that taxpayers think the company is trying to kill the referendum in the name of the taxpayers — many of whom don’t want to pay for the added burden of municipal services needed to support a huge retail store? Perhaps Mesa taxpayers remember the police costs in nearby Chandler, AZ, where Wal-Mart is one of the notable areas of police activity. Such concern for the taxpayers did not seem to hinder Wal-Mart from putting itself on the ballot in Eureka, CA last summer, and forcing taxpayers there to foot the bill. It seems that democracy, as corporations understand it, is something that you use to augment your bottom line, and abandon when it threatens your bottom line. This must be the true corporate “price” of democracy. If Wal-Mart wants to help the taxpayers, why don’t they “buy” the election for them. This concept of buying elections shouldn’t be too foreign a concept for a company that has spent more than $250,000 per election in other places.
