Picturesque Gig Harbor Is Fighting To Keep Wal-Mart From `Boxing' It In

GIG HARBOR - Across white picket fences and cafe tables, inside knickknack shops along the waterfront, at City Hall and at QFC, the talk of the town has taken on a doomsday tone: Yes, good neighbor, the Big Box is coming.

The Big Box is Wal-Mart.

The world's largest retailer wants to land in this picturesque little town on the Kitsap Peninsula. And depending on who's talking, it's either the beginning of the end of life as residents know it, or the start of consumer heaven in this patch of the woods.

Big Box refers both to the store's physical design and what it represents to many small-town residents - the straight, unfeeling, unrelenting edges of corporate America. With its wealth of resources, the Box generally lands wherever it pleases.

In Washington, Wal-Mart has opened stores in 13 locales, with three new stores - in Port Orchard, Bremerton and Longview - scheduled to open this year.

But it won't happen in Gig Harbor, residents say. The near-unanimous chorus has been a resounding "No to the Wal!" An impassioned group of residents is determined to make this town the first in the Northwest to ward off the retail giant. Already, a petition drive against Wal-Mart has collected 11,500 signatures. The town's total population is barely 4,000.

But the fight has barely started.

The conflict is a recurring Northwest theme translated into a new set of terms: Beyond the typical development debate, there's now the rhetoric of dueling rights, namely the right of free enterprise versus the right of a community to preserve its character.

There are the traditional worries: traffic, crime, financial hardship for small businesses. But the bottom line is simple, said resident Russell Holster: "We don't want to become a Big-Box town."

Gig Harbor is off Highway 16, a few miles west of the Tacoma-Narrows Bridge, a postcard-pretty town with fishing boats in the harbor and Mount Rainier in the distance. Cafes and antique shops line the waterfront. The people who live here - professionals, artists, retirees - came here for its small-town comforts. The people who visit - half the businesses are geared for tourists - come for its quaintness.

There are more Espresso stands than taverns, more wild-bird feed shops than auto-supply stores. The town is hip, image-conscious, politically correct. The mayor's office is adorned with a framed poem called "Plant A Tree."

"Gig Harbor," said the Peninsula Gateway, the local newspaper, in a recent editorial, "is not a Wal-Mart Community."

Wal-Mart, rightly or wrongly, is seen as blue-collar, character-less, more concerned with volume than quality. It's also seen as a serious threat to the small businesses that make up the town's retail core. You can't compete with a store, the sentiment goes, that buys underwear by the train-load.

Everything about Wal-Mart is big. They don't build stores but superstores. The one proposed for Gig Harbor, on 20 acres near the intersection of Point Fosdick and Olympic drives, is 133,000 square feet. With the parking lot, the total size would equal 15 football fields. The largest existing store in town is Safeway, with 68,000 square feet.

Wal-Mart, based in Bentonville, Ark., is the giant among discount retailers, with 2,400 stores worldwide and annual sales - $82 billion last year - surpassing the Gross National Product of many Third World countries.

With its legal and real estate divisions bigger than most small-town city halls, the chain has been able to muscle its way past most citizen protests. The retailer usually likes to locate in small towns or on the outskirts of cities, where property taxes are lower and there's less competition from large retailers.

But the giant doesn't always win. A handful of towns in New England have successfully warded off Wal-Mart advances. In general, they've been small, upper-middle-class towns with a strong sense of identity and a united citizenry. They've been towns like Plainfield, Conn., and Westford, Mass., with money to spare for lawyers, researchers and public-relations people.

Gig Harbor sees itself in the same category. Local activists, led by Tom Morfee, president of the Peninsula Neighborhood Association, have done their homework and plan to employ the same strategies.

Plus, they've signed on a computer guy. Holster, a freelance website designer, has taken the fight into cyberspace. He has created a website on the Internet, the worldwide network of computers, to garner support and network with other small towns fighting off Big Boxes.

The website, titled "Us Against The Wal," is presented in the form of a fable of Good versus Greed. A website, Holster will tell you, is a compilation of different kinds of information: text, pictures, video and audio. Think of it as a three-dimensional talking document.

It may or may not affect the final outcome. Nevertheless, Morfee, Holster and a long list of former adversaries, including the past president of the local Chamber of Commerce, Brian Morford, have joined forces early to head off the Big Box at the pass.

Wal-Mart hasn't bought the property yet. It's still a few months away from finishing its first environmental study, and maybe a year away from completing a final study.

"Why is there such anger?" asked Bob Cheyne, Wal-Mart director of community relations. "We're a retailer. We're not a nuclear waste factory."

The giant believes, with some good reason, that it gets a bad rap. It doesn't intend to ruin any town's character, rather, said Wal-Mart spokesman Les Copeland, to simply "offer more retail choices."

Ignored in much of the bad press, Copeland said, is that, in the majority of cases, Wal-Mart is welcomed with open arms. Only one out of 10 communities protests the coming of one of the superstores.

And yes, while there have been cases in which small businesses have suffered, Copeland said, most of the time small businesses benefit from the extra traffic brought in by a Wal-Mart.

Gig Harbor Peninsula Chamber of Commerce director Gordon Wohlfeil concurred. He said the Wal-Mart in Aberdeen, for example, actually created more retail jobs by boosting sales for neighboring small businesses.

Wohlfeil is under some heat these days. While 70 percent of the chamber's membership opposes Wal-Mart, the chamber's board has decided to take a neutral stand on the issue.

"If they're going to come in," Wohlfeil said, "we might as well work with them to mitigate the impacts."

Walt Smith, owner of Active Construction in Gig Harbor, is ambivalent and philosophical. He'll remind you that much of the area surrounding the proposed Wal-Mart site is already commercial. There's already 700,000 square feet of retail in that area, much of it taken up by medium-sized stores such as Safeway, QFC and Ernst. That area is zoned for commercial purposes.

In other words, stores will fill the 20-acre site no matter what.

What would be the difference, Smith asked, between a gigantic Wal-Mart and a few medium-sized stores, such as Circuit City or Payless, all clumped together? It's a rhetorical question. The result would be the same: It'll either be one Big Box or a bunch of Medium Boxes.

These days in America, Smith will tell you, the choice often comes down to this, and it's enough to make anybody a little mad.

The address for the website "Us Against The Wal" is: http://www.harbornet.com/pna