Merced Stop Wal-Mart Action Team

On Monday Sept. 15, Merced City Council approved a reimbursement agreement with Wal-Mart for an additional $45,817 worth of consultants' studies on the proposed Wal-Mart distribution center's environmental impacts.

Cities use reimbursement agreements to make it seem as though mega-corporations such as Wal-Mart aren't just buying environmental studies for their projects. Instead, the City fronts taxpayer money, and then Wal-Mart pays the City back. 

At least that's how it's supposed to work.  In 2006, the City ordered $114,885 in environmental studies, but it took a delinquent payment notice and the threat of a referral to Collections to get the biggest corporation in the world to pay up. 

If Wal-Mart already repeatedly sues cities until their tax assessment is reduced, doesn't bother to pay its debts to one of the poorest cities in the U.S. and locks its janitors inside to save money, imagineif City Council lets Wal-Mart dumps its pollution on Southeast Merced.

According to the City's staff report, the studies include:

• $4,581 for City staff to "administer the EIR process"
• $6,000 for past and future telephone conferences
• $3,590 to update the EIR's air quality analysis in several aspects
• $3,897 for more detailed studies about nearby residents' exposure to noise
• $3,000 for project management (consultants' staff time)
• $5,500 in additional edits to the EIR's traffic report
• $4,000 to update traffic data 
• $8,095 to study additional intersections and roadway/freeway segments
• $5,710 for updated noise and air quality analysis with new traffic studies

Wal-Mart first announced plans for a Merced distribution center in August 2005, when it predicted the facility would open "in 2008." Much has changed since then, including an ongoing recession, rising fuel prices and concern over global climate change, all of which have had a major impact on Wal-Mart's supply chain.

It's becoming increasingly expensive to manufacture goods in China and Southeast Asia and ship them across the globe to U.S. stores. As author Naomi Klein recently said in the New York Times: 

"If we think about the Wal-Mart model, it is incredibly fuel-intensive at every stage, and at every one of those stages we are now seeing an inflation of the costs for boats, trucks, cars...That is necessarily leading to a rethinking of this emissions-intensive model, whether the increased interest in growing foods locally, producing locally or shopping locally, and I think that's great."

To maintain its profits during the economic downtown, Wal-Mart has been consolidating its distribution network.

• At the end of July, Wal-Mart pulled out of an 800,000 square foot distribution center near the Port of Savannah, GA, citing the need to "streamline efficiencies" in its operations.