Pennsylvania Town Orders an Economic Impact Study of a Proposed Wal-Mart Store
Upset with Wal-Mart's plans to put a 24-hour, 153,000-square-foot supercenter in this small Pennsylvanian borough, Exeter First has flooded local newspapers with letters, gathered hundreds of signatures for a petition, and crowded public meetings demanding that the full impact of the project be evaluated before deciding whether to permit it.
At first, city officials seemed happy with the impact study submitted by Wal-Mart, but Exeter First highlighted the misinformation in the study, which did not examine effects on surrounding businesses, employment, and the costs of city services. The borough council then voted unanimously for an independent community impact study.
For more information on community impact studies, including examples of studies done by other communities, see our page on economic impact review.
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Comments
Retail Impact Analysis
I think this is good information that most communities fail to consider, very much to their long-term detriment most of the time. But I could not help thinking that this idea of a retail impact assessment is treating the symptom and not the problem.
That is, if a community is serious about not developing hyper-scaled retail that while generating short term tax revenue ultimately cannibalizes sustained economic growth, then don't build the conditions that draw it in the first place.
1) Don't build the arterial grid street network that draws this interest. If you have a road carrying 40,000+ cars per day, expect a whole host of problems, including hyper-scaled retail as the default land use. If you don't build that, they won't come.
2) Have subdivision requirements that prohibit hyper-scaled blocks and developments, or that allows them only for rare exceptions of projects where a regional impact is desired; and
3) Absolutely do not think that this is only an infrastructure cost issues (i.e. Don't think "if the developer builds the arterial grid and several turn lanes that are needed for the traffic model, the city got a good deal."). Not only do not build it from general funds, but specifically prohibit developer building it from private or public/private sources.
So if you are really serious and politically prepared to turn away the (false) short term sales tax gains, don't build the environments where these car hog land uses thrive. Then you can sit back and watch the market work, rather than go through all the awkward gyrations of getting local governement in the business of assessing its retail health.
Re: Retail Impact Analysis
Dear anonymous: We strongly encourage communities to say "no" to big-box development altogether and provide a variety of policy models (in the menu on the right) to help them do so. We also extensively document the tax and other costs of these big developments (under Big-Box Impacts on the right). But for cities where elected officials are still convinced that big-box stores are good for the economy, an economic impact review can help bring to light some of the consequences and create an economic basis for citizens to oppose and stop the project (rather than having to rest their case on narrow zoning rules, they can build it on economic grounds). That's an important step forward for many places.
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