Wal-Mart foes may sue.
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When Mayor Larry Delgado broke a 4-4 tie last month to conditionally approve a Super Wal-Mart, the furious debate over the monster store seemed to have ended.
New rumblings, however, may re-ignite the controversy.
At least one city councilor who voted for the store now tells SFR he could change his vote when Wal-Mart developers present a revised traffic plan for the project at the end of the month. "I'm not that far dug in. It's really a double-edged sword for me," Councilor Miguel Chavez says. "On the one hand I'm looking at the service side advantages to having another Wal-Mart. But, I also agree with the project's opponents-I don't like Wal-Mart's business practices and principles, and it's too bad somebody better didn't come in ahead of them."
The 150,000-square-foot store, slated for the proposed Cerrillos Road Entrada Contenta development, was approved-pending the traffic study-during the wee hours of Aug. 16 following five hours of contentious debate [Outtakes, Aug. 17: "
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If any of the councilors who originally voted for the project-Chavez, Matt Ortiz, David Pfeffer or Carol Robertson-Lopez-switch sides and none of the councilors who voted for the project change their votes, the proposal would be defeated.
Further, two leaders of the anti Wal-Mart group, the Coalition to Limit Big Box Stores in Santa Fe, say they are considering suing either the city or Wal-Mart if the project moves forward.
Lawyer Stephen Durkovich says the City Council violated its own rules by allowing Councilor David Pfeffer to change his vote from yes to no in order to have the proposal reconsidered after it failed on an initial vote. That maneuver allowed the store provisional passage the second time around. Durkovich says Pfeffer never received unanimous consent from the Council to change his vote, as stipulated in Robert's Rules of Order, the parliamentary handbook used by the Council.
"The Super Wal-Mart development was defeated. It's over," he says. "It would be a memorable adventure for Wal-Mart to proceed after it was rejected. They move forward at their own peril."
City Attorney Bruce Thompson disagrees and says anyone who had a problem with the Council's action "had an obligation to raise the issue at the meeting, and they didn't. The City Council has adapted this sort of procedure in the past."
Meanwhile, District 2 City Council candidate Marilyn Bane, a member of the Big Box Coalition's executive committee, says the city is legally vulnerable for failing to address the traffic issue when the Super Wal-Mart proposal first came before the city's Planning Commission July 7.
"The traffic mitigation plans should have been sent and approved by staff at that time," she says. "The developer's application was never complete."
At the coalition's behest, Al Pitts, former chairman of the Arterial Road Task Force, analyzed the revised traffic plan and found "the document is unresponsive to numerous traffic impact issues that Council has raised. It lacks data; it does not engage in any coherent analysis pertinent to the assessment of neighborhood impacts. It is fatally flawed from an analytical standpoint. It is not compliant with many of the provisions of the Santa Fe Urban and Extraterritorial Future Roads Plan." Kim Randle, a Wal-Mart spokeswoman, did not return phone calls.
"You gotta love city politics," Councilor David Coss, who voted against the project, says wryly of the ensuing mess. "The lesson is that you should never make decisions at 4 am."
