In the world of David-and-Goliath environmental battles, good news is never final. The company that backs away from a big-box development project one day can decide somewhere down the road to start all over again, particularly when it calculates that the opposition—usually overworked and underfunded—is dismantled.
That said, it's still very good news that Wal-Mart has shelved plans to build a so-called supercenter at the Hampshire Mall in Hadley. Even if Wal-Mart and its prospective landlord, Pyramid Corp., which owns the mall, are only stalling, the delay may be crucial. Larger events may finish the job that was begun by Hadley Neighbors for Sensible Development, StopSprawlMart and other opponents of the supercenter project. The whole thing was based on a post-World War II build-it-and-they-will-drive-there model that's about as well adapted to the 21st century as tyrannosaurus rex, what with $4-a-gallon gas staring consumers in the eye and the country lurching into recession. Lawyers for the world's largest retailer have cited the economic "downturn" as one reason for scotching the project.
It seems, too, that the overkill involved in building ever-larger Wal-Marts where Wal-Mart stores already exist, as in the case in Hadley, has brought the Arkansas moguls a slap on the wrist from the powers in the financial world. Last June the New York Times reported, "Wall Street has begun to balk at the number of new stores Wal-Mart opens every year because the retailer's capital expenses have grown, on average, 19 percent a year over the last decade, faster than its sales and profit growth." Around that time, Wal-Mart made a widely publicized decision to cut the number of supercenters it planned to open in 2007 by nearly one-third.
Plans for the 220,000-square-foot supercenter originally included an automotive center with a gas station to be sited only 300 feet from a pond. Gasoline runoff, if it contaminated the pond, would run underground to a swampy area behind the Stop and Shop store across Rte. 9 and eventually reach the Connecticut River. But a more controversial feature of the project was the amount of traffic the supercenter was expected to draw—6,500 car trips per day—and the threat that traffic would pose to people using the popular bike path, the Norwottuck Rail Trail.
While the supercenter project is on hold, other things need to happen in Massachusetts. All regulations for development need to be reviewed in the light of the advancing effects of climate change.
The state did well, early in the supercenter permittal process, to reprimand Pyramid and Wal-Mart for submitting plans that inaccurately delineated the wetlands around the mall. But with global warming bringing drought, flooding and agricultural instability, regulations should be tightened to reflect the increasing importance of wetlands and open land that can absorb water and be used for growing crops (the Hadley supercenter would have needed a parcel of what is now farmland near the mall) and to discourage car-intensive development at the expense of environmentally friendly transportation. The 11-month-old state regulation requiring new developments to quantify the volumes of greenhouse gases they will generate, and compensate if those volumes exceed certain standards, is an excellent first step.
