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February 23, 2006
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COVER STORY: Big Box Brawl The Nashua Planning Board narrowly denied Wal-Mart’s site plan for a supercenter at the current site of Building #19 last month. After charging through Conservation Commission and Zoning Board challenges, Sam Walton’s retail giant looked like it was on its way into town. Many consider the company just plain evil, but Wal-Mart would tell you they’re simply a business. After all, doesn’t Magneto have perfectly good reasons for fearing non-mutants? Is Lex Luthor really a villain, or just a multimillionaire hanging out with high school farm boys? All that stood in Wal-Mart’s way was a group of concerned citizens who didn’t want their traffic snarled and their water polluted. They banded together and, with a supporting cast numbering in the hundreds, did battle for their way of life. This is their story. Paul Johnson (Alan Alda) “I sat there in shock,” Johnson said, “only because we’d had the ball yanked away so many times.” He’d been expecting the 4-3 vote for weeks, having closely analyzed the comments of all board members to see which way they were leaning. The vote had been delayed several times, and it looked like the hearings might be extended again. There was even a sealed envelope given to each board member by city staff. According to Johnson, the envelope contained new testimony, though little new information, from the applicant. Board members never opened the envelopes prior to voting. As head of the team, Johnson served as the voice of the organization, the client of record for their attorney and, perhaps most importantly of all, negotiator. Not with Wal-Mart — within the group of people fighting to keep Wal-Mart out. “I spent a lot of time truly being a centrist peacemaker,” Johnson said. The groundswell of opposition to a Wal-Mart Supercenter at 420 Amherst St. inevitably brought out people with a variety of different perspectives on the matter. It was an “enormous challenge,” he said, keeping everyone on the same page as far as what strategies to pursue, what to say to the media, how to persuade Planning and Zoning Boards not to approve the store and how to recruit more supporters. “The fact that it was Wal-Mart certainly brought more energy from some quarters,” Johnson said, but he didn’t believe there was anyone involved who cared nothing about the potential water pollution or traffic problems. “The water is clearly what got us motivated,” Johnson said, “but it was the traffic that everybody was going to relate to.” Jocelyn Demuth (Janeane Garofalo) “I kind of became public outreach coordinator,” Demuth said. “What that meant is maintaining and developing a large, now it’s a very long, e-mail list of people who wanted to be kept abreast of what was going on.” Whether it was passing around clipboards, organizing a yard sale or gathering names from www.cleanwaternotwalmart.com, Demuth became the communications node that opponents relied upon for their information. When Wal-Mart’s representatives would cancel their appearance “at the last minute” — usually because a full board was not available — Demuth would be standing at the entrance to City Hall, letting people know before they climbed three flights of stairs to the auditorium. She also wrote a guide for testifying in front of a municipal board. Demuth credits Nashua citizens for getting involved. “If the town hadn’t cared, it would be built,” she said. “I don’t know a hundred people, a hundred fifty people that I could get to come to meetings. The town has to care or they won’t come and they won’t speak.” Sue Newman (Stockard Channing) As she wrote letter after letter, she encouraged others to write as well. When she finally hooked up with CASNH, she took to posting flyers and distributing lawn signs. Barbara Pressly (Dame Judi Dench) As a former state legislator, she saw herself as an advisor and strategist for the opposition group. She was also charter chair of the Historic District Commission here in the city, so she knew local land use laws well. “Sure!” Pressly said. “I mean, I shop there when I need something that they have. The bottom line is, I have yet to meet a single person who believes that any merchant or any company of that intensive a use is appropriate on that site ... If they can find a place that the traffic can handle it and it doesn’t impact our water, I wouldn’t object.” Jed Callen (Bill Pullman) Callen’s law firm, based in Concord, specializes in land use law around the state of New Hampshire. Callen himself has represented many groups of people who would be adversely affected by particular developments, so this wasn’t unfamiliar territory for him. There was one new challenge, though. “This was my first Wal-Mart, which was an education in itself,” he said. His past opponents have included gravel pits, cellular communications towers and junkyards. Few have had the corporate backing Wal-Mart brought to the proceedings. “We very studiously stayed away from things that were not relevant to the land use issues,” he said. When speaking before the Zoning and Planning Boards, Callen did not talk about Wal-Mart’s corporate policies, health care benefits, international trade relationships or anything else of interest to someone against Wal-Mart simply because it was Wal-Mart. It wouldn’t help their case of protecting this one particular piece of land. One thing that surprised Callen was the amount of time this case spent in front of city boards. If anything, he said, he expected it to take “many months.” In similar cases in other towns, a board might schedule discussion of only one aspect of an application for a given night. Not only does this shorten meetings, it reduces cost for all those involved, by not requiring all paid consultants to be present at all meetings. “For the most part the Planning Board was extremely civil and attentive and focused,” Callen said. But the last few meetings were marred by questions of procedure and professionalism as the applicant submitted more information to the board after the hearing was closed. “I was extremely distressed that that seemed to fall apart at the end.” Charles Friou (Ian McKellan) Charles Friou served as moderator of Citizens Action until last year. He doesn’t shrink from the environmentalist label. His home features passive solar heating — though he said it was mainly an economic decision to buy it, and newer building techniques are even more efficient. Paul Johnson refers to him as the group’s “elder statesman,” a term which drew a hearty laugh from Friou when he heard it. The Wal-Mart fight, though, he took seriously. “When we got involved, we were getting involved in something whose dimension we didn’t know,” Friou said. The matter first came to his attention with the shuffling of two people off the city’s Conservation Commission in early 2005. Those two people, he learned, had been opposed to a Wal-Mart Supercenter at 420 Amherst St. He wouldn’t go so far as to say they were pushed off — one resigned and one was not reappointed at the end of her term. Wal-Mart’s earlier site plan, which called for a much larger store, never made it past a few boards in February of 2005. When the new plan came to light, chopping off a quarter of the proposed square footage, Friou went over it with a critical eye. He found studies of existing Amherst Street traffic that were inconsistent with earlier studies — including the one referenced in the previous application. “It was clear to me ... they’ll say almost anything to achieve their goal,” he said. Those traffic studies were questioned by the Planning Board as well, and ended up being the key point convincing four members to vote against the site plan. Even if traffic won the day, Friou has other concerns. He doesn’t want zoning and watershed protection laws to be “chipped away” by boards granting small exceptions here and there. “The water issue is real, and the city has to do far more than it is” to monitor and ensure the safety of the water supply, he said. “There is not the attention that should be paid to that.” Dr. Robert Roseen (Matt Damon) Citizens Action first contacted Roseen in May of 2005, after the first supercenter proposal had been rejected, but another was on the way. “The conversation began back then as, would I be interested in evaluating the stormwater management plan?” Roseen said. It was never his intention to design an equitable plan for treating and cleaning the water of oil, antifreeze, chemicals and other pollutants brought in by the sharp increase in traffic. His role was to critique Wal-Mart’s plan, and he found it lacking. He emphasized that his analysis referenced peer-reviewed scientific studies of the equipment proposed, not manufacturer or industry claims. His “Roseen Report” became a central document in the opposition’s arsenal. Roseen has 13 years’ experience in water resource studies, including hydrology and hydraulics evaluations, environmental systems analysis and site design for stormwater treatment devices. Stormwater management has been his primary focus for the last four years. At UNH, a one-acre research facility was built to study more than a dozen different types of management systems on an existing commuter parking lot. His report did come into question when one calculation included figures that were off by a factor of 1,000. That error occurred on both sides of an equation, Roseen said. “It did not change conclusions at all,” he said, “so what the Planning Board saw was correct.” He was also asked to explain what “parts per million” meant when another testifier apparently used the term incorrectly, and felt that he had been painted as a sloppy scientist when it wasn’t even his testimony he was correcting. The fact that most board members were satisfied with Wal-Mart’s water cleansing plans, especially given the existence of an artificial treatment plant, left him further frustrated. “I felt like what I learned from that process is that it has less to do with the quality of the study and more to do with the quantity of the study,” Roseen said. “Had we been Shell Oil, we could’ve had 12 specialists too.” Comments? Thoughts? Discuss this article and more at hippoflea.com |
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