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BIG BOX SWINDLE – COMING TO A TOWN NEAR YOU

Dear Editor:

With the ink barely dry on the City and County agreements to fund part of the development of the Burleson Crossing, the bulldozers and other heavy equipment are preparing yet another patch of Bastrop farm land for “big box” sprawl retail development.

I was originally opposed to the project due to the blending of tax money with corporate funds to produce a retail shopping center. After reading the book “Big Box Swindle” by Stacy Mitchell, I see the damage to Bastrop may be worse than the potential waste of several million in tax dollars.

The subtitle of the book is “The True Cost of Mega-Retailers and the Fight for America’s Independent Businesses.” The book sites city after city devastated by big box retailers such as Wal-Mart, Home Depot, Lowe’s, Target and on and on.

Bastrop Economic Development Corporations CEO, Joe Newman stated in the Austin Business Journal, the project will be a “win win for everyone.” Well let’s just examine the “wins” first. The win column is easy. The developer, with the help of the Bastrop Economic Development Corporation, conned our ignorant politicians to allow the project to be built mixing our tax dollars with corporate dollars, had to make a nice payday, the amount, which has never been disclosed. Steve Durhman claimed "Retail has not kept up with demand in Bastrop County,” The builders of the project who have little stake in Bastrop County and the retailers (also who have little stake in Bastrop) who will “night drop” income from their retail outlets to such cities as Bentonville, Arkansas; Mooreville, North Carolina, New York, New York; Orlando, Florida and etc.

The Front-runner in the win column has to be the anchor big box, Lowe’s. It gets to fight on in Bastrop with its archrival, Home Depot. Lowe’s doesn’t care so much if it makes money, but more if it can chip away at Home Depots profits. Wall Street measures the “success” of the big box by the number of stores it opens more than its income. Employees at the Home Depot (a big box not without sin) say it won’t be a “win win” for either company. The other big box retailers should effectively finish off any and all local competition since proposed tenants include, Office Max, Best Buy, Barnes and Noble, Hobby Lobby, Sams, Target and the list goes on. Even though Bastrop has 40 or so restaurants within a few miles of each other, Burleson Crossing hopes to add one or more of the following; Olive Garden, Outback Steakhouse and Red Lobster to name a few of the chain restaurants. There is even hope of a Cinemark or Regal movie theater which will surly put the Chestnut Square Complex in the vacant building category.

Well it looks like I have wandered off into the “loser” section already. So who loses? First off, the “community” looses. Gone is the personal interaction of residents with small business owners who have a real stake in the town. Remember Main Street? Well it is gone and the Burleson Crossing will insure no “retail stone” is left for anyone attempting to open a mom and pop business other than a gift/candle/antique shop. Eventually Main will be nothing more than storefronts for lawyers, real estate offices and other venues most people only use once or twice in their lives. Oh wait, it already looks like this!

Local businesses always return a large percentage of their income back to the community. They often pay employees more than the big box retailers and in some cases purchase goods for sale from local artisans and etc. Big box retailers almost never purchase local items, requiring more and more on imported goods, often custom made to their specifications from overseas manufacturing plants such as those found in China and India. According to one contributor to “Big Box Swindle,” Wal-Mart obtains products for its stores from more than 4,000 factories in China. Recent inspections of these factories reveal; “below minimum wages being paid, falsified time cards and brutally long hours.” Suppliers of products to big box retailers are often forced to guarantee sales even if the lack of sales is not the fault of the product. Lately big box retailers are having their own brand of product manufactured for them in direct competition with the very items they are selling. More than a few notable tool and kitchen product manufacturers have gone under, pressured by competition from the store brand.

Joe Newman claims "Retailers and restaurants rely on traffic counts, not just rooftops. There's a lot of leakage,” Newman says, in the ABJ, “the area stands to benefit from the sales tax dollars that more retail will generate. We try to keep property tax down, so we need retailers in here for revenue stream." Guess Joe hasn’t checked the rise of Austin, Texas property taxes even though they have built big box retail at nearly every major intersection. Newman’s statement of “trying to keep property tax down,” is a myth if not a complete fabrication.

Several paragraphs taken from “Big Box Swindle” appeared to be written for Bastrop.

“Taxpayers end up footing the bill for big-box retailers in other ways as well. Although many cities assume that converting farmhand and open space to shopping centers will yield a financial windfall and reduce levies on house owners, the tax benefits promised by developers in many cases prove to be as illusory as are the employment gains. Focused on only one side of’ the equation growing the tax base-many cities have lost sight of the fact that development also creates costs. These costs are quite high in the case of sprawling big-box stores-so high that they can reduce the tax gains to a negligible trickle or even result in a net loss for the city.

One frequently overlooked cost is the effect big-box stores have on existing property values. Nearby homes may lose value due to the added traffic and noise, but more significant are the effects on existing commercial property. As downtown and older shopping centers lose sales, they also decline in value and ultimately produce less tax revenue. In an analysis of the impact of Wal-Mart’s arrival on several Iowa towns found that most of the superstores’ revenue (84%) came at the expense of other businesses, many of which closed. These dead downtowns and derelict strip malls (thousands of which now litter the country) also represent a tremendous waste of public investment in the form of roads, water lines, utilities, and the like that are sitting idle or underutilized while taxpayers build still more Infrastructure to serve new big-box complexes.

Police expenses are another factor. This is partly because, as traffic increases, officers must spend more time patrolling roads, issuing traffic citations and responding to accidents. But some big-box stores also generate an exceptionally large volume of police calls for crimes like shoplifting and check fraud. Many cities are unprepared for this. In Royal Palm Beach, Florida, the arrival of Home Depot, Lowe's, Wal-Mart, and other chains along a state highway resulted in fifteen hundred additional police calls.

In states where cities derive the majority of their revenue from property taxes, as is the case in Massachusetts, sprawling retail centers are more often financial losers for local governments. The same is true for cities that depend on local income taxes, as communities in Ohio do. Case studies in Dublin, Delaware, and other Ohio cities have found retail development to be a net drain, because its Iow wage jobs produce little revenue relative to its high public image?”

The environment is also a big loser to the big box retailer. Water run off from big box retail centers is one of the leading sources of pollution according to the Center for Watershed Protection. Nothing delivers more pollution faster than run off from big box parking lots. Even though they may plant a few trees and install a park bench or a holding pond, you still have to get to them by car. Did anyone do any ground water contamination studies? Where does the water run off from Bastrop’s big box retail center go? Could it end up in the Colorado River after one of our heavy rains? Even after a big box is abandoned its parking lot run off continues to pollute and Lowe’s has closed 30 stores recently.

Given the present 27-year down turn in new home construction and the lowest retail sales growth in 6 years, one has to wonder what was the motivation behind the rush to throw up another big box center? One has to wonder about the whole government/business deal given the recent official corruption convictions in Bastrop.

In reality, it is just probably an expensive case of stupidly. The snow job by the developers and their local lackeys at the Bastrop Economic Development Corporation and Chamber of Commerce must have bowled them over, kinda like our US Senators and Congressional Representatives being “misled” when it came to attacking Iraq.

The Bastrop Economic Development Corporations May 2007 newsletter touts “Bastrop EDC Has Best Year Yet.” I wonder if they are referring to the bribing of a business from nearby Flatonia and Giddings, with the gift of “free land” as something to be proud of? There weren’t any comments concerning jobs and businesses that have closed their doors in Bastrop in 2007. I called each city and they didn’t sound too happy BEDC had stolen their businesses even though these revenues from these venues were microscopic. It is also doubtful employees will move from Giddings and Flatonia to Bastrop, compounding Bastrop’s traffic woes.

In a short while Bastrop, Texas will be unrecognizable from any other city of its size in America. Every big box retailer has basically the same goal. Destroy the competition and make money for the stockholders. If a town dies in the “race to the bottom line,” that is just too bad. The small old town of Bastrop will just be a memory, swallowed up by the big box looking to make the big bucks. Better take some pictures of Main Street because just like the glaciers in Montana’s Glacier National Park, it might not be there tomorrow.

Vic Vreeland

PO Box 217

Cedar Creek, Texas – 78612

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