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I was disappointed with the Warsaw City Council's decision to deny Meijer a chance to build a store on Husky Trail.
Meijer asked to rezone property from residential to commercial. Nineteen acres at the site already are zoned commercial, but the remaining 20 or so acres are residential.
The plan commission, after taking some heat from neighbors in the area, denied the request.
The city council then had to decide whether to abide by the plan commission's recommendation.
The council tabled the request a couple times, asking Meijer for more traffic details and to downscale their development plans.
Finally, earlier this week, the city council denied Meijer's rezoning request.
There will be no Meijer store on Husky Trail.
Meijer offered to spend approximately $750,000 to rework the intersection of U.S. 30 and Parker Street to improve an existing traffic trouble spot.
But we turned them down.
The neighbors must be very elated and proud of the job they did to effectively kill the development.
City Councilman Joe Thallemer, who also sits on the plan commission, lives near the now-dead development. He held an informational meeting for his neighbors and really went the extra mile on this issue. That effort is commendable.
I hope to see that same level of involvement from him in all other major developments that come before the plan commission.
Maybe Meijer will try to locate somewhere else around town and maybe they won't. Time will tell.
Maybe they'll put a store on the existing 19 acres of commercially zoned land and local taxpayers will get stuck with the bill to fix up the Parker Street intersection. Wouldn't that be a hoot?
While all of this is troubling, what concerns me most about this whole Meijer saga is an apparent shift in attitude I'm seeing.
At the outset, opponents said they had nothing against Meijer. They said they would welcome Meijer to town - just not in their back yard.
But that seems to be changing. Now I see a significant contingent of people who don't want Meijer here at all.
In fact, they are against any large retail store coming to town. In fact, they are passing around petitions to halt construction of a new Wal-Mart store on Ind. 15N.
They are probably going to fall short in that effort. I don't think they will be able to stop Wal-Mart from building.
The land already has been rezoned and a city councilman doesn't live next door.
If Wal-Mart submits an adequate site plan, the city council has little choice but to approve it.
Nonetheless, there is a group of people in town who plan to fight. They don't want any more commerce around here.
I'll call them the ACACs. The anti-commerce, anti-competition crowd.
The ACACs will tell you that if a Meijer or a new Wal-Mart - a "big box" store, the ACACs like to call them - comes to town, it will destroy us.
There will be no other stores left. Everything else will close down.
It will kill our downtown. No local businesses will survive.
Of course this is pretty much Chicken Little nonsense. What the ACACs overlook is one simple truth: The very thing they cling to so dearly has already disappeared.
They cling to the notion of a quaint downtown with mom and pop stores all over the place.
They cling to the notion of the five and dime or the neighborhood grocery.
Those things are long gone.
We lost those things years ago when retail moved out east of town on U.S. 30.
Since then, the downtown has evolved, and, frankly, quite nicely, I might add.
The downtown - with a couple exceptions - has businesses that are pretty much "big box" proof.
Will a "big box" store hurt Mountain Music, Digs Diner, Breadings Cigar Store, Courthouse Coffee, Male Fashions, Crownover Jewelers, Celebrations, Baskin Robbins, Readers World, Dennie House, Warsaw Tool Supply, In The Garden, Thorntree, Warsaw Antiques, Tarkio, The Core Store, The Gathering Place, Le Chocolate Shoppe, Iris Trail, Horizon Pharmacy, et. al.?
I don't think so. Those businesses have loyal customers and niche products. Big box stores can't touch them. That is the evolution of a modern downtown. There are lots of lawyers and bankers downtown these days, too.
That's pretty much what's happened to downtowns, especially in small towns, all over America.
Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing, I suppose, is debatable. But what is not debatable is that it has already happened. If the ACACs wanted to fight big box stores, they should have started a long time ago. They're about 30 years late.
Besides, I firmly believe that if you provide good service and good value for your customers your business will survive just about anything. You will have loyal customers who will continue to do business with you.
The ACACs argue this isn't true. That the only way to ensure a business survives is to stifle competition.
The ACACs also like to point out that the profits from a big box store don't stay here. "That money goes right out of town," they say as they pound their fists on the table. (They concede that the development generates property tax revenue and jobs that bring more wages into the community.)
But based on that argument, we shouldn't attract any industry, either. After all, if we attract a General Motors plant, wouldn't all the profits go to Detroit?
Another thing the ACACs don't seem to fathom is that people from this town already shop at big box stores. Only they drive to another town to do it.
If we have a big box here, it will draw shoppers from other towns. Once they're here, who knows what else they might find to buy. They might eat out. They might buy fuel. They might even check out our car dealers or our downtown. Who knows?
But left to the ACACs, we'll never know. They're dead set against big box stores and they will fight to keep them out of our community.
On an ideological level, competition is the hinge pin of free enterprise and capitalism. I believe in free enterprise and capitalism.
The ACACs don't.
I hope our community leaders don't get caught up in the ACAC furor.
By the way, if you spell ACAC backwards, you get ...
