To protect your community from the negative impact of Wal-Mart, you need to aggressively develop the following six basic strategies:
Every “community fight” against Wal-Mart starts with a local group who will lead the fight and get the message out to the general public. If there is no existing local neighborhood association or citizen’s group already up and running, create a new one. Your strategy when building your group should be to reach out to a broad-based set of supporters. Include neighbors, clergy, educators, union members, retirees, former public officials, small business owners, etc.
You will need help from many people and groups in your community fight, but a core group of leaders can be effective can do well with as few as 12 people. This steering group should plan to meet at least weekly during a campaign to plan strategy and tactics. A larger group can meet less often, but should be connected by weekly status reports. You should try to designate the core leaders who will be most committed to this community fight (remember, every successful campaign needs leaders).
Give your new group an upbeat name like “Yourtown First”, which means the homeowners, taxpayers, citizens of Yourtown come first. The key in naming your group is to brand you group for what it is – citizens coming together to fight for their community.
Every community fight will need a basic strategic plan. Don’t worry its very easy. Just think about your strategic plan as your groups’ plan for how you will fight Wal-Mart.
Every strategic plan is about means and ends. Remember, your groups’ ends are clear – it’s the goal of stopping Wal-Mart from developing and destroying your community. The means are all about the tools and tactics you will use to be successful. Thankfully, you have many tools at your disposal.
Some of the tools and tactics you can consider are:
A successful community fight depends on hiring the expertise you need. Because many of these community fights deal with local land use rules, permits, and zoning regulations, you will want to hire the right legal expertise to help your group challenge Wal-Mart’s plans for development.
You should sit down with a land use attorney to talk about what the most fruitful legal arguments will be against this project. If there are any special permits, conditional use permits, rezonings, annexations, or any discretionary actions a planning board or city council must make, then you have a legal opening to delay or stop a project. Any appeal to court will take at least six months to a year, and time is money to a developer.
We strongly recommend you pick a land use lawyer who is not from your town. You may also want to ask some of your allies if they have any suggestions as to whom to hire.
Securing a lawyer early will send the message to town officials that you are willing to go to court if your concerns are not heard and acted upon. Wal-Mart has already made a similar threat. Be sure to talk to your attorney about other legal strategies, like seeking a moratorium, or placing a cap on the size of individual buildings.
Aside from legal expertise, you may need to retain a traffic engineer, since traffic is another sinkhole for many project reviews. You at least want your traffic engineer to do a “peer review” of whatever Wal-Mart tries to pass off as a traffic report.
If there are storm water runoff or wetlands concerns, you’ll need a hydrologist or similar expert. For noise and air pollution issues, talk to two or more civil engineering firms, or look to your nearest university in the environmental department for assistance.
To be successful, and to help you organize as effectively as possible, your group will want to do some fundraising. Fundraising will help you compete and win. Contrary to what you think, to compete against Wal-Mart you don’t need lots of money – but money helps and individuals and groups will support you.
Here’s how to start:
Your budget, to some extent, will depend on the size of your community and how much media and organizing you believe you need to do. If you need to raise $15,000 to start, prepare a one page budget that spells out exactly what you need and how you plan to spend it.
You should write out a list of local business that would be negatively affected and destroyed by Wal-Mart. Understandably, given the broad impact of a Wal-Mart, that can be almost every small business in your community. Plan to visit the businesses that are especially vulnerable to Wal-Mart negative business practices first.
Bring a letter and some facts sheets and ask them to support the community fight by giving a donation to the effort. Ask 15 businesses (or more) to become “sustaining supporters” for your campaign.
If you have a union local in your area, sit down with them and talk about what kind of resources you need.
You will have a number of allies in your community fight that you may not think would be interested in supporting the effort. Reach out to community groups, progressive groups, neighborhood associations, as well as many others, to support your group’s efforts with a donation, either monetary or by giving you volunteers.
Some of the people most sensitive to the negative community effects of a new Wal-Mart will be citizens who live closest to the proposed Wal-Mart. Plan to canvass the neighborhood and ask your neighbors, friends, and local citizens to sign up to support the effort and to donate to the campaign.
Once you set up your group and start fundraising, be sure to let your local media know. Send out a press release about your group launching, its goals, and why this is an important issue for the community. Let the media know that you are raising money, but that you expect Wal-Mart to spend huge sums of money in your town to “buy” the zoning decision they want behind closed doors.
Fundraising rules will vary by state, but – in general- unless you are involved in a ballot campaign, contributions to your group do not have to be publicly recorded. Please check with local authorities for the rules in your area.
It is important to use a message that will frame this community fight for what it is – Wal-Mart vs. your community. The goal is to gain as much public exposure and support by letting as many of your local citizens know about the “high cost of Wal-Mart’s low prices.”
Some of the first steps you can do to get your message out are:
Produce a one or two sided informational literature piece, that you can use as a mailer or a handout, which boils down your specific arguments against Wal-Mart. You can pull facts from wakeupwalmart.com about Wal-Mart’s bad corporate behavior.
Your flyer should focus mainly on what is wrong with this specific Wal-Mart project, and why the community should not support it and why local officials should vote it down. Gather quotes from local opinion-makers about why this proposal is a bad fit for your town. Highlight the negative effects to small businesses, local jobs, traffic, and other issues that your community cares about.
Quote from your town’s Comprehensive Land Use plan. There will be plenty of quotes about what is appropriate for your town.
Check out the cost of inserting the flyer into your local paper. Develop an alternative vision of what a project on this property could look like. Ask a local architect to draw up smaller, mixed use projects of office space, housing, and neighborhood retail, to show citizens that being anti-Wal-Mart does not mean being anti-growth or anti-business.
A simple website can be a powerful tool for letting concerned citizens know about developments, updates, and important meetings related to your community fight. However, don’t depend on your website alone. A successful community fight against Wal-Mart depends on whether or not you reach out to as many citizens, local groups and leaders as possible. You can link your local website to WakeUpWalMart.com's Community Fights section by sending an email to CommunityFirst@WakeUpWalMart.com.
A Wal-Mart battle is a campaign, and you have to keep on winning every day of that campaign. By shaping public opinion, you can win the battle. You need to be especially aggressive in reaching out to local TV, radio, and print reporters. Part of the strategy in getting press coverage is being aggressive, sincere, and letting local reporters know why this is such an important local issue and battle. You can look in the yellow pages or on the internet for a list of local newspapers, TV, and radio stations.
There are a number of steps you can take to maximize press coverage:
Get in the habit of sending a press release out to let local reporters know about key developments. You should definitely send a release out when you launch your group, and when you have important meetings or rallies. Remember to designate one or two (or more) press contacts that will be the lead spokespersons for your group.
Look also to create press releases for your group at every turn. Create events, like inviting Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott to come to Yourtown for 24 hours. Offer to pay for his bed and breakfast, because you know in 24 hours or less you can convince him that Yourtown is an awful locale for another supercenter. If any given story in the paper mentions only pro-Wal-Mart opinions, ask for equal time to get your message out.
If you hold a rally or plan to canvass an area as a group, or plan a press conference at the site of a proposed Wal-Mart, plan to send out a press advisory. A press advisory simply tells the press about an event that is scheduled (when, where, why, who) so they can send a TV crew or reporter(s) to cover it. You want to make sure you fax the advisory to the assignment desk the day before the event and then follow up again the day of the event.
Begin immediately by generating a large volume of letters to the editor. A committee of Yourtown First should concentrate on providing information and talking points to people in your community who are willing to write letters. Any time there is a story in the press about Wal-Mart, use the story as an opportunity to send in more letters.
In the end, a Wal-Mart campaign is likely to end with a vote – so know where your local elected officials stand. It is important to come up with a list of all the elected officials who are involved or will be involved in your community fight, as well as those leaders who have status in the community (but not may have direct power over the decision) and start contacting them.
Begin right away to scope out who makes the land use decisions, and how are they likely to vote. If you have a planning board of 7 people, you need to win over 4 of them. So who are the most likely 4, and what do you know about them? Who influences them? If your group is friends with any of them, sit down and talk strategy privately with your allies.
Once you know who your allies are, you want to make sure you keep them. Once you know who opposes you, you want to try and change their minds.
Mobilize letter writing campaigns to those on the board or the city council, whoever makes the final call. Never threaten or intimidate elected or appointed officials—you can leave those tactics to Wal-Mart. But have different people in your group “adopt” members of the planning board to make sure they are getting lots of good mail and encouragement to vote to protect your community from Wal-Mart.
Because elected officials behave differently when they know they are being watched, always get your troops out to every public meeting, and pack the place until the bitter end. It ain’t over until the fat company sings. Never attack a local official, keep the focus on Wal-Mart -- always.
