Wal-Mart expansion foes voice concerns

Several area residents during a public hearing on the project Monday night blasted Wal-Mart’s plans to expand its operations in Sonora.

Speakers at the Sonora Planning Commission hearing accused the Arkansas-based retailer of, among other things, killing mom-and-pop shops and smaller regional chain stores, contributing to blight and increasing the United States’ trade deficit with China.
  

Wal-Mart’s expansion plans for the Sonora store include keeping it open around the clock and increasing its retail space from 130,166 to 158,532 square-feet to accommodate a full-service grocery section. The local store currently sells limited groceries.

Monday’s hearing addressed the draft environmental impact report analyzing the expansion plans. Comments from the hearing will be used to develop the final EIR, which will also be subject to public input at a later date. The draft report analyzes two other potential alternatives including: No expansion and a roughly 14,000-square-foot expansion.

In perhaps the night’s most passionate plea against Wal-Mart, Jan Yancey recalled a 1998 motorcycle trip she took to Sturgis, S.D., for the city’s famed motorcycle rally.

She said the slice of America she saw during her trip — dead downtowns and thriving Wal-Mart stores on small city outskirts — prompted her to boycott Wal-Mart.

“Wal-Mart raped and pillaged its way through the business sector of each community,” Yancey said. “Wal-Mart was killing the American Dream.”

The same will happen in Tuolumne County, she said.

Even the manager of Safeway, Jeff Hampton, expressed concern to commissioners about how Wal-Mart’s proposed expansion will affect his store, located across the way from Wal-Mart in the Crossroads shopping center.

Hampton pointed out that jobs provided by Safeway and its competitor in the nearby Timberhills shopping center, Save Mart, are union jobs that pay living-wages. 

Domenic Torchia, a community activist who is also president of the Tuolumne County Democratic Club, took the Wal-Mart criticism a step further, claiming a large portion of Wal-Mart workers receive government aid due to the low wages paid by the retailer.

He said the 83 jobs the Wal-Mart expansion is expected to create will, in the end, merely supplant better retail jobs in the community.

Sharon Marovich, of the Tuolumne Heritage Committee, worried about the shells of empty stores that could be left in Wal-Mart’s wake. She said the draft environmental impact report did not analyze such “urban decay.”

She pointed to John’s Tuolumne Market in Tuolumne as a likely mom-and-pop casualty of the proposed expansion.

Former Tuolumne County Board of Supervisors member Laurie Sylwester, meanwhile, summed up Wal-Mart’s actions as a “profit grab, with profits going to Arkansas.”

Addressing the larger picture of Wal-Mart, she said most of Wal-Mart’s goods come from China, where labor and products are cheaper and less-regulated. Supporting Wal-Mart only adds to the U.S.-China trade deficit, she said, and hurts California farmers and suppliers.   

At one point, the rhetoric became too much for two local Wal-Mart workers — invoice clerk Cherie Turner and pharmacy tech Mary Lamendola — who rushed to the microphone and decried what they saw as the unfairness of the public hearing.

“I’m not on welfare and I do make a good living at Wal-Mart,” Turner said.

Wal-Mart “runs fine without a union,” Lamendola added.

The two wanted to rebut the criticisms, but were told by planning commissioners they would have their chance at a future public hearing.

Lamendola and Turner were among a silent minority of Wal-Mart supporters, who could be identified by “Wal-Mart supporter” shirt pins, nestled in between the largely anti-Wal-Mart contingency.

Supporters of the expansion say it will bring jobs and tax dollars, and stimulate economic development.