May 29, 2006
Citizens' initiative | After a fast-growing grassroots campaign, big-box developers are faced with a tough sell along Maine's midcoast
By Douglas Rooks
Over the past 15 years, big-box development has mushroomed across Maine. It started with Wal-Mart and Home Depot, but the universe of retailers in Maine has expanded to include names like Kohl's, Target and Lowe's. And, for the most part, Maine communities have been receptive to these stores. Proposals have seemed to sail through the approval process, and last June, voters in Augusta soundly rejected a petition aimed at stopping a 550,000-square-foot development expected to include Target and Lowe's.
But when the big boxes turned their attention to the small towns along Route One between Brunswick and Rockland, something different happened. The welcome mat wasn't rolled out, and residents weren't waiting with open arms for the retail development that other Maine towns have embraced. When three southern midcoast towns voted to restrict or outlaw big-box stores on a single town meeting day in March, it made headlines across the state. But the similar results, organizers in various towns agree, have the same genesis.
The town-line-crossing movement that seemed to come out of nowhere owes a great deal to two women from Bremen, a small town of 800 just west of Damariscotta. The pair last October sounded the alarm and began working with local citizens to question ˆ and, later, to oppose ˆ big-box development proposed or just rumored for places like Damariscotta, Waldoboro, Thomaston and Wiscasset. None of these towns has 5,000 residents, and some are considerably smaller. Eleanor Kinney and Jenny Mayher, the women behind the effort, at first glance seem like the kind of people from away that natives usually dismiss out of hand. As a Boston Globe story from early May noted, Kinney graduated from Harvard and Mayher from Yale. The story also described the pair as "stay-at-home moms" and recent transplants to Bremen.
But the two women also know a great deal about organizing. They reached out to town officials, business owners and just about anyone who would listen to them, eventually assembling an impressive public and media campaign that was heavy on numbers and short on rhetoric. They say, for instance, that while big boxes trumpet the jobs and the tax revenue a new store will generate, studies show that national chains recirculate far less of their revenue than locally owned stores, and do not increase overall employment while often driving down wage rates. "With a big box, 84% of the revenue leaves the state, while with local owners 53% stays here," Kinney said.
Their fledging organization, Our Town, worked quickly to establish the terms of discussion. "This is about communities having debates and making choices," Kinney said. "It's not about being anti anything."
Their towns
Our Town Damariscotta, the first of what is now six Our Town affiliates, quickly struck a chord with the business community along historic Main Street, which has survived and even thrived after a Route One bypass was built 30 years ago. Damariscotta resident Mary Kate Reny, part of the Reny family that operates discount stores across the state, welcomed the Our Town effort, which initially sought to curb development of a 186,000-square-foot Wal-Mart Supercenter in Damariscotta. "We needed them, and they need us," she said.
Our Town, she said, helped spur the development of the Damariscotta Regional Business Alliance, a group of two dozen businesses that banded together to understand why Wal-Mart was targeting such a small market, and what they could do in response. Unlike in some other towns, where business people hesitate to speak out against potential competitors out of concerns for appearing self-serving, the broad membership of what became the Damariscotta Regional Business Alliance provided safety and comfort. "It wasn't just the merchant competing with Wal-Mart," said Reny. "It was the doctors and the teachers, the hardware store owner and the pharmacist, and, of course, Reny's."
The business alliance helped make and pay for a series of print advertisements, which ran in local papers during the month leading up to the vote, that expressed members' opinions about why big boxes were unnecessary in their town of 2,000 people, and how existing businesses could work together to provide the same services. Since the Wal-Mart plan was confirmed last November, the alliance has agreed to extend downtown merchants hours on Thursday evening, undertake joint promotions with galleries and restaurants, and launch a survey to find our what goods customers want that aren't provided downtown. "Wal-Mart might have been the cause [for forming the group], but we quickly realized we needed to change ourselves," Reny said.
Our Town organizers recognize that local businesses are necessarily at the forefront of big-box campaigns, but Kinney emphasizes that Our Town likes to work with local officials rather than going straight to the petition route. The group approached selectmen in Damariscotta about putting a question on the ballot, and only began gathering signatures from townspeople when it appeared town officials would take too long act, according to Kinney. The group in November submitted nearly 300 signed petitions from Damariscotta residents to city officials ˆ well over the 105 signed petitions required. The petition specified a 35,000-square-foot limit, and asked for a vote at the annual town meeting in March.
Damariscotta had outspoken Wal-Mart supporters, but the tide of opinion began turning by January. Two weeks before the election, the Damariscotta Region Chamber of Commerce, representing businesses in 12 towns, endorsed the 35,000-square-foot cap on store size, and on Election Day townspeople voted it in by a two-to-one margin.
In the weeks before and after, residents in Newcastle and Nobleboro voted to restrict big-box development after each town's selectmen agreed to put the issue to voters. In both towns, Our Town provided campaign assistance and help working with the town selectmen and planning boards to get the questions on the ballot.
It would be too soon to declare the southern midcoast a Wal-Mart-free zone, however. On May 16, voters in Thomaston favored a 150,000-square-foot cap put on the ballot by selectmen, over the 70,000-square-foot limit advocated by the Our Town affiliate in that town. Residents in Edgecomb and Waldoboro will soon vote on moratoriums or size caps of their own. It's unclear whether the towns will follow in the footsteps of Damariscotta by capping the size of development proposals, or Thomaston by allowing all but the largest big-box proposals. In Thomaston, a big-box store application already was pending when voters approved the 150,000-square-foot growth cap.
Holding back?
Thus far, Wal-Mart has taken a lower profile than in earlier campaigns in which its store plans aroused opposition. In 2002, a zoning change was necessary to enlarge a discount Wal-Mart store in Farmington into a supercenter, and Wal-Mart recruited employees from its nearby stores to pack a town meeting and shout down opponents trying to speak. The company also bankrolled an extensive ad campaign featuring a bejeweled society matron expressing disapproval of the store ˆ none too subtly suggesting that opponents were elitists who wanted to block low prices for ordinary working families. Wal-Mart won the Farmington vote decisively.
While Wal-Mart did support some citizen groups in the midcoast in recent months, its efforts lacked the bite of the Farmington campaign. After the March 21 votes, company spokesman Christopher Buchanan refused to comment, saying only that Wal-Mart continues to explore locations in the area.
Jane Bechtel Lafleur, executive director of Friends of Midcoast Maine, a smart-growth group in Camden that provided technical assistance to Our Town, says the big-store/small-store debate has shifted dramatically during the past 30 years. She grew up in Lewiston, and remembers when construction of the original Auburn Mall ˆ itself now surrounded by big box stores ˆ "devastated downtown. It just emptied it out," she said.
Downtown merchants now understand better how to compete with national chains, she said, but the chains themselves have become more aggressive in their efforts to expand.
And some believe the construction of the mammoth Wal-Mart distribution center in Lewiston (see "Clearing the record," Nov. 14, 2005) is driving the chain's current efforts to expand into smaller Maine markets like Damariscotta. "They've made a tremendous investment in a facility that supplies their supercenters," Kinney said. "They have to build more stores to justify it, so they're going to places that never thought they'd be considered for a Wal-Mart."
But Lafleur also said that the debate going on in the towns is healthy, because it reflects local choices and has been conducted in a fair and open manner. In the end, Kinney and Mayher may have benefited from not living in any of the towns voting on big-box restrictions. "They didn't have a vested interest in the result, and they encouraged everyone to speak for themselves," Lafleur said.
Mary Kate Reny argues that this year's vote was just the beginning of a debate she expects to go on for years. "There are people in Damariscotta who really wanted Wal-Mart to come here," she said. "One answer is that there are similar stores not far away, that we don't need a Wal-Mart every five miles. But we also have to listen to them, find out what they want and see if we can't provide it another way."
For any person in business, she said, listening to customers is the only long-term strategy that works.
But when the big boxes turned their attention to the small towns along Route One between Brunswick and Rockland, something different happened. The welcome mat wasn't rolled out, and residents weren't waiting with open arms for the retail development that other Maine towns have embraced. When three southern midcoast towns voted to restrict or outlaw big-box stores on a single town meeting day in March, it made headlines across the state. But the similar results, organizers in various towns agree, have the same genesis.
The town-line-crossing movement that seemed to come out of nowhere owes a great deal to two women from Bremen, a small town of 800 just west of Damariscotta. The pair last October sounded the alarm and began working with local citizens to question ˆ and, later, to oppose ˆ big-box development proposed or just rumored for places like Damariscotta, Waldoboro, Thomaston and Wiscasset. None of these towns has 5,000 residents, and some are considerably smaller. Eleanor Kinney and Jenny Mayher, the women behind the effort, at first glance seem like the kind of people from away that natives usually dismiss out of hand. As a Boston Globe story from early May noted, Kinney graduated from Harvard and Mayher from Yale. The story also described the pair as "stay-at-home moms" and recent transplants to Bremen.
But the two women also know a great deal about organizing. They reached out to town officials, business owners and just about anyone who would listen to them, eventually assembling an impressive public and media campaign that was heavy on numbers and short on rhetoric. They say, for instance, that while big boxes trumpet the jobs and the tax revenue a new store will generate, studies show that national chains recirculate far less of their revenue than locally owned stores, and do not increase overall employment while often driving down wage rates. "With a big box, 84% of the revenue leaves the state, while with local owners 53% stays here," Kinney said.
Their fledging organization, Our Town, worked quickly to establish the terms of discussion. "This is about communities having debates and making choices," Kinney said. "It's not about being anti anything."
Their towns
Our Town Damariscotta, the first of what is now six Our Town affiliates, quickly struck a chord with the business community along historic Main Street, which has survived and even thrived after a Route One bypass was built 30 years ago. Damariscotta resident Mary Kate Reny, part of the Reny family that operates discount stores across the state, welcomed the Our Town effort, which initially sought to curb development of a 186,000-square-foot Wal-Mart Supercenter in Damariscotta. "We needed them, and they need us," she said.
Our Town, she said, helped spur the development of the Damariscotta Regional Business Alliance, a group of two dozen businesses that banded together to understand why Wal-Mart was targeting such a small market, and what they could do in response. Unlike in some other towns, where business people hesitate to speak out against potential competitors out of concerns for appearing self-serving, the broad membership of what became the Damariscotta Regional Business Alliance provided safety and comfort. "It wasn't just the merchant competing with Wal-Mart," said Reny. "It was the doctors and the teachers, the hardware store owner and the pharmacist, and, of course, Reny's."
The business alliance helped make and pay for a series of print advertisements, which ran in local papers during the month leading up to the vote, that expressed members' opinions about why big boxes were unnecessary in their town of 2,000 people, and how existing businesses could work together to provide the same services. Since the Wal-Mart plan was confirmed last November, the alliance has agreed to extend downtown merchants hours on Thursday evening, undertake joint promotions with galleries and restaurants, and launch a survey to find our what goods customers want that aren't provided downtown. "Wal-Mart might have been the cause [for forming the group], but we quickly realized we needed to change ourselves," Reny said.
Our Town organizers recognize that local businesses are necessarily at the forefront of big-box campaigns, but Kinney emphasizes that Our Town likes to work with local officials rather than going straight to the petition route. The group approached selectmen in Damariscotta about putting a question on the ballot, and only began gathering signatures from townspeople when it appeared town officials would take too long act, according to Kinney. The group in November submitted nearly 300 signed petitions from Damariscotta residents to city officials ˆ well over the 105 signed petitions required. The petition specified a 35,000-square-foot limit, and asked for a vote at the annual town meeting in March.
Damariscotta had outspoken Wal-Mart supporters, but the tide of opinion began turning by January. Two weeks before the election, the Damariscotta Region Chamber of Commerce, representing businesses in 12 towns, endorsed the 35,000-square-foot cap on store size, and on Election Day townspeople voted it in by a two-to-one margin.
In the weeks before and after, residents in Newcastle and Nobleboro voted to restrict big-box development after each town's selectmen agreed to put the issue to voters. In both towns, Our Town provided campaign assistance and help working with the town selectmen and planning boards to get the questions on the ballot.
It would be too soon to declare the southern midcoast a Wal-Mart-free zone, however. On May 16, voters in Thomaston favored a 150,000-square-foot cap put on the ballot by selectmen, over the 70,000-square-foot limit advocated by the Our Town affiliate in that town. Residents in Edgecomb and Waldoboro will soon vote on moratoriums or size caps of their own. It's unclear whether the towns will follow in the footsteps of Damariscotta by capping the size of development proposals, or Thomaston by allowing all but the largest big-box proposals. In Thomaston, a big-box store application already was pending when voters approved the 150,000-square-foot growth cap.
Holding back?
Thus far, Wal-Mart has taken a lower profile than in earlier campaigns in which its store plans aroused opposition. In 2002, a zoning change was necessary to enlarge a discount Wal-Mart store in Farmington into a supercenter, and Wal-Mart recruited employees from its nearby stores to pack a town meeting and shout down opponents trying to speak. The company also bankrolled an extensive ad campaign featuring a bejeweled society matron expressing disapproval of the store ˆ none too subtly suggesting that opponents were elitists who wanted to block low prices for ordinary working families. Wal-Mart won the Farmington vote decisively.
While Wal-Mart did support some citizen groups in the midcoast in recent months, its efforts lacked the bite of the Farmington campaign. After the March 21 votes, company spokesman Christopher Buchanan refused to comment, saying only that Wal-Mart continues to explore locations in the area.
Jane Bechtel Lafleur, executive director of Friends of Midcoast Maine, a smart-growth group in Camden that provided technical assistance to Our Town, says the big-store/small-store debate has shifted dramatically during the past 30 years. She grew up in Lewiston, and remembers when construction of the original Auburn Mall ˆ itself now surrounded by big box stores ˆ "devastated downtown. It just emptied it out," she said.
Downtown merchants now understand better how to compete with national chains, she said, but the chains themselves have become more aggressive in their efforts to expand.
And some believe the construction of the mammoth Wal-Mart distribution center in Lewiston (see "Clearing the record," Nov. 14, 2005) is driving the chain's current efforts to expand into smaller Maine markets like Damariscotta. "They've made a tremendous investment in a facility that supplies their supercenters," Kinney said. "They have to build more stores to justify it, so they're going to places that never thought they'd be considered for a Wal-Mart."
But Lafleur also said that the debate going on in the towns is healthy, because it reflects local choices and has been conducted in a fair and open manner. In the end, Kinney and Mayher may have benefited from not living in any of the towns voting on big-box restrictions. "They didn't have a vested interest in the result, and they encouraged everyone to speak for themselves," Lafleur said.
Mary Kate Reny argues that this year's vote was just the beginning of a debate she expects to go on for years. "There are people in Damariscotta who really wanted Wal-Mart to come here," she said. "One answer is that there are similar stores not far away, that we don't need a Wal-Mart every five miles. But we also have to listen to them, find out what they want and see if we can't provide it another way."
For any person in business, she said, listening to customers is the only long-term strategy that works.
Most Recent
Most Recent
Comments