Real Estate

Brunswick tries to keep things small

By Sam Pfeifle

While Portland has been largely unsuccessful in keeping local shoppers from shirking downtown in favor of outlying box stores, the people of Brunswick are not content to sit back and watch their city's heart get bypassed for the outskirts of town. Already saddled with the Cook's Corner area, which includes a Wal-Mart, Ames, and the Cook's Corner Mall, the proposed Wal-Mart Supercenter off exit 24 in Topsham has been a call to action for concerned Brunswick-area residents.

Beginning with a call for a moratorium on "superstores" -- alternately defined as above 75,000 and 100,000 square feet -- by Brunswick Town Council member Faith Moll, the council eventually decided that the town would be best served by exploring the impact of superstores on the area with a two-day seminar, to be held Monday and Tuesday of this coming week. "I got together with my colleagues in Bath and in Topsham," says town planner Theo Holtwijk, "We went from bringing in one guest speaker to eight guest speakers over two days," and they have a third day in the works.

The town already has an ordinance in place that restricts building "footprints" to 50,000 square feet, with the existing Wal-Mart and Ames considered "non-conforming."

"We don't say `grandfathered,' because they would think they had special rights," explains Holtwijk. And special rights are just what Wal-Mart is clamoring for, looking to expand the current store into one of their Supercenters that contains, among a vast array of other things, groceries. When Brunswick balked, Wal-Mart looked across the river to Topsham, which has no such footprint laws, although a November ballot initiative may implement one at 90,000 square feet.

People are divided on what impact Wal-Marts and other box stores have on the local communities they invade. Les Bray, a retail consultant and real-estate appraiser who runs South Portland-based Main Street Insights, has been following Wal-Mart's march across Maine for some time, and has reached the conclusion that Superstores are not retail draws, as Wal-Mart and others continually claim. Using a calculation he calls "pull factor" -- a comparison between average and actual per capita retail spending -- he has shown that of the 20 current Wal-Marts, three of which have been converted to Supercenters, more than 70 percent have led to a decline in the town's overall retail strength. There are currently 10 more Supercenters proposed in Maine, from Rockland to Farmington, Ellsworth to Oxford.

This trend comes as no surprise to Stacy Mitchell, a former Portlander and currently a Research Associate with the Institute for Local Self Reliance in Minnesota. She's written The Home Town Advantage: How to Defend Your Main Street Against Chain Stores...and Why it Matters (ILSR, 2000), and has been asked to speak at this week's Brunswick symposium. "Retail spending is generally a fixed pie," she says. "New retail just shifts the money around." Thus, the business Wal-Mart attracts comes out of local pockets. A more disturbing trend is the one recently found by ILSR in Virginia, where Wal-Mart prices varied as much as 25 percent. Not surprisingly, prices were higher in communities where competition had been driven out of business. "There's a real danger to consumers," warns Mitchell.