53 thoughts on “Wal-Mart wants Peoria Stadium for new Super Center”

1. In other words, What can the taxpayers give Walmart to build there. I am sure our city council will find something.

2. Peoria does not need another Walmart. This is a great proposal to walk away from.

3. I’d guess Wal-Mart is planning to build a supercenter there to replace the existing store on University.

4. WalMart in that area could potentially have a negative impact on Alwans, Super Liquors, the bars across from the stadium, and any other small to mid-size business in that area.

   If this is what the Stadium land would be used for, I say boo.

5. Count on WalMart getting this land.

6. This is really unbelievable… One more reason to leave this city. Support local business. Please don’t give my taxpayer money to Wal-Mart. No good can come of this.

7. Gross.

8. Given the past record of our City Council, I’d say we better all get ready for another super center. But I think the bars across the street will do okay. The other businesses, not so much.

9. Alawn’s will be OK Quality is quailty. Walmart is…well…walmart

10. Many of us go to Walmart, despite our opinion of it. I don’t grocery shop there, but it is handy for hardware, auto, electronic accessories, some quick pick up things.

    Having said that, it’s been known for awhile that Walmart was looking to replace the University Store. Not enough space to expand there, so they had to look elsewhere. I have no beef with that.

    I do have a beef with them wanting the city (just like developers) to create this business district, give them all kinds of incentives, tax breaks, etc. to build at the Stadium site (plus have the city buy the land, then sell back part)

    In my opinion, the City of Peoria should say no, we are broke. If the City buys the land for, say, $2 million, Walmart may decide to offer only $500,000 for it. After all, it’s all about jobs and job creation, you realize. (yes, we’ve heard that story a few times)

    I say, let Walmart buy the land directly from District 150. Then Walmart, being the community-minded folks they are, DONATE back the portion of land used by the Park District. Win-Win situation for all. The city is not involved financilly, D150 gets money for the land, Walmart gets to build their new center, and the Park District no longer has to pay for leasing that area.

    Cities create TiFs, Enterprise Zones, Hospitality Zones, and business districts to LURE business to blighted, undeveloped areas. This case is not like that. It is already developed; a business already has identified they want to build there. Let them pay for it all.

11. I think this one is simple. If Wal-Mart can come up with enough money to give D150 a significant windfall, leave the park district unharmed, and find a buyer for the current University Wal-Mart this should be a go. All this without any subsidy.

    If it can’t do those things – it should probably be a thanks but no. This new facility would potentially give Wal-Mart additional income (if not they wouldn’t pursue it) – but it would give Peoria little. Need groceries? Schnucks, Kroger, Hy-Vee, Aldi are all close.

12. I say let walmart get creative with the existing areas or their current location on university. Why should the city bend to zone more commercial space when it’d hurt all the other existing commercial areas that could use new investment.(and would likely blemish university with a vacant store).

13. How could the City Council even entertain this idea? The space is absolutely beautiful. Who would want to ruin that?

14. I must correct my earlier post. According to a PJS article, D150 cannot legally sell the land directly to Walmart. It must have a go-between, i.e. the City of Peoria. And it’s not like the City would be out the money. If/when the sale to Walmart is complete, the City would be reimbursed.

    But I still think Walmart, being one of the top corporations in the world, can afford to pay for everything, with no incentives or tax breaks; and they can pay for any changes in street infrastructure. Just my opinion.

15. Having our leaders plot in secret to bring yet another skuzzy Walmart to our area is a travesty. Peoria does not need another Big Box, particularly at the expense of Peoria Stadium.

    And, what about those rumors of a new stadium north of Peoria High?

    BTW, I have not been to Walmart in more than 8 years and have no intention of ever doing business with them again. This situation does not raise my opinion of them.

16. There has to be a lot more to this story.

17. For those of you concerned, there has been an online petition set up on change.org. To access and sign it, follow the link below.

    http://www.change.org/petitions/city-of-peoria-don-t-sell-the-district-150-peoria-stadium-to-wal-mart-corp-2?utm_campaign=share_button_action_box&utm_medium=facebook&utm_source=share_petition

18. petition is useless. East bluff residents did that and it was uses as bath paper so OSF could build a future “energy center” at property in the residental neighborhood of the east bluff. People , lots of people at city council, school board and park board meetings and any other meetings is your only hope. Money is the driving force and is hard to stop.

19. I am very disappointed that the city would even consider being a party to this Yes the stadium has fallen into disrepair but that should be no cause to sell it This area should be improved along the lines of Eastside Center in East Peoria.

20. Clayton. Wal-mart takes the path of least resistance. Peoria’s school district is weak. The school board is disfunctional. They sit on a large plot of land in the middle if the city that is largely underutilized.

21. soon there will be another empty big box store on University. Like Pioneer Parkway. and don’t forget the wonderful Cub Foods on Knoxville.

22. It just seems like a setup for a bigger plan. “Oh, you don’t want a Wal-Mart there, then here is a tax to make the improvements for that land”.

23. it would be shameful to sacrifice this piece of green space for what will be propogandized to us taxpayers as jobs and tax dollars. the proposal by walmart is arrogant; that the corporation is willing to put such a proposal in writing for public consumption demonstrates how far ‘economic development’ has gone locally and even nationally. there was a time when a purchase proposal that asked for such things would have been astonishing.

24. How is there NO other location in Peoria for WalMart to build another disgusting store?? They seriously have to choose a PARK and make Dist150, the City, and IDNR jump through hoops to bring a scourge on society into a nice neighborhood. Every Wal-Mart employee costs the government nearly $2,000 a year in health care and LINK payments. And can you imagine the home values tumbling in that area with a Super WalMart there?? Tons of traffic that the streets can’t handle, noise from semis being unloaded in the middle of the night, the hundreds of parking lot lights left on all night….. I am hoping the new members of City Council can stop this from moving forward. Or at the very least, it can be squashed by the IDNR.

25. The more I drive by the Stadium the more disgusted I get. The space is so well maintained. The PPD must be doing the maintenance. I know it can’t be PSD150! Has anyone seen the old school building on Moss Ave? Shameful! The grass hasn’t been cut and weeds are everywhere.

26. lanestar7 says that every WalMart employee costs the government $2000 per year in health care and LINK payments. I don’t see how that is possible. WalMart draws employees from two demographics. They hire currently unemployed people or people currently employed at other low paying jobs hoping for better opportunity. How can employing the unemployed cost the government more than when they were unemployed?

27. Because Walmart staff discourages their people to hold other jobs and they treat their employees like crap. They don’t pay enough for a person to live off and it is a fact that Walmart employees do indeed have to use Federal and State programs just to survive. This would be much different if only just Mrs. Walmart took a billion dollar a year cut from her other billions and they paid the employees a livable wage. Wouldn’t br3eak Walmart in the slightest.

28. it’s called crony capitalism. If most companies proposed something like that, they’d be laughed out of the room, but Walmart makes campagin donations, don’t they?

29. For $25 you can get seat at the Mayor’s breakfast and watch as he hands the deed over to WalMart execs.

30. If you want to make yourself sick, you can do it for less than that.

31. hightowner62: As a company think about using as your strategy to hire part time low wage people. It is self rewarding for the company – they don’t pay employees too much or give them too many hours. So the company gets cheap labor, they don’t need to absorb benefit costs and those employees naturally qualify for the benefits of the public dole due to low income. (Things like paid for daycare, LINK/SNAP, WIC, Medical card, housing assistance, whatever else is out there)

32. First, this proposal has to be approved by the Peoria Public Schools District 150 Board of Education. If it’s been in negotiation since 2012, that vote may come soon. But then, the City of Peoria has to agree to buy the land from D150. If folks here oppose that, they need to take action now, whichever method they choose. If folks here support it, they need to take action now, whichever method they choose.

    Overall, I’m in support of keeping that area green with parks and recreational facilities. I just knows it’s going to be tough beating a big corporation like Walmart. But it has been done.

33. Hightower: Wal-Mart is bad no matter what. Don’t you listen??

34. Lane: However, I agree that location is not good for a Wal-Mart for some of the reason you mention. I hope it dies.

35. Conrad, I agree. I don’t understand it when people say it’s so hard to avoid Wal-Mart. I made a decision in 2002 never to shop there again, just as I made a decision in 1996 never to eat the slop at McDonald’s again and I have not been back to either since. I stopped cold turkey and had absolutely no withdrawals. It’s not hard to stop shopping there folks. It was actually more of a nuisance for me to go there than anything.

    Once you stop, you’ll realize how much better you feel and while you’re at it, stop giving Starbucks you hard earned cash for their over-priced, over-roasted sweatshop coffee. I haven’t sipped that ash-water since I first stepped foot into an independantly owned coffee shop in 1999.

36. No one has made a convincing argument that employing an unemployed person costs the government $2000/year more than when they were unemployed.

37. School fnances are a mess, Park District can’t attract quality softball tournaments because fields and lighting are sub-par, and the City Council can’t develop anything besides a zit that doesn’t involve tax incentives or give aways to non-profits. There are no answers coming from these groups, only more problems.

38. No one has ever made a convincing argument? The Labor Center at UC Berkeley might not agree with you there: http://laborcenter.berkeley.edu/retail/walmart.pdf

    When a WalMart opens and runs out smaller businesses (let’s say Alwans and Super Liquors go out of business after WalMart opens, just for arguments sake), they CREATE unemployment and then they offer much, much lower paying jobs to those Alwans and Crusens staff they forced out of their decent jobs and those people are now on Medicaid and LINK where they were not before. And people like hightower can say “Well, they solved those unemployed people’s problem so what’s to complain about??”

    The Journal of Urban Economics ran a study in 2008 and they don’t agree with hightower either. “The employment results indicate that a Wal-Mart store opening reduces county-level retail employment by about 150 workers, implying that eachWal-Mart worker replaces approximately 1.4 retail workers.” http://www.socsci.uci.edu/~dneumark/walmart.pdf

    I will be anxiously awaiting hightower’s rebuttal studies and FACTS that WalMarts are great for the economy.

39. My biggest problem with this plan is the lack of actual growth for the city. This does not grow anything in Peoria. It replaces a park with a big box store that already has a location nearby. And the cherry on top, we have a commercial district with another big box store sitting empty.

    One thing that has been under reported is that Wal Mart only wants about 1/2 of the land. There would still be a park somewhere on that property, but probably not multiple softball fields and the such.

40. hightower: Why don’t you Google it and do some reading. Maybe you’ll learn something

41. Last week a District 150 board member went to the City Council meeting to protest any more TIF’s. Yet 150 is proposing to sell the stadium to Wal-mart, who–according to C.J.’s research–is asking that all of the property become a TIF, right? Isn’t that a classic case of cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face? As a speaker at Monday’s BOE meeting pointed out, also, property values will go down if a Wal-mart moves in–how does that help District 150? Shortsighted–of course.

42. A Forbes magazine article explains the effects of Walmart this way, “Think this through in the long term for a moment. Back a couple of centuries we had some 80% of all the people working on the land in order to provide the food for the 100% of the people. Then we invented new farming technologies which required less human labour. Until we got to the point we’re at now where some 1.5% or so of the total population grow all the food for the 100% of the population. This means that 78.5% of the population can go and do something else. Find the cure for cancer, run childcare centres, staff the colleges where we all get our educations, nurse the sick and run the libraries and…..all those things that make up our civilisation. If 80% of all the people had to spend their entire lives standing around in muddy fields we could not have all of those other things. It’s exactly because we reduced the labour demands of agriculture that we’ve got the warm bodies available to do everything else.

    Using less labour to perform one specific task frees up that labour to go and perform other tasks. This is good, this is progress. And what is it that WalMart actually is? It’s simply a new technology for retailing goods. It’s a pretty big one, a pretty profitable one to be sure, but that is really what it is. Just a new labour saving technology for the distribution of goods.”

    I guess some on this site yearn for the days when 80% of us toiled in muddy fields.

43. Sharon, Walmart is not asking for a TiF to be formed, but the PJS article does state that they were “proposing the city to form a business district and develop a master plan for the entire stadium site, under an intergovernmental agreement among the three public bodies.”

    http://www.pjstar.com/news/x1806086375/Wal-Mart-proposes-store-at-Peoria-Stadium-site#ixzz2WiZ3QbF9

    The proposal from Walmart to the 3 government bodies does not ask for any tax breaks or developer incentives. But I’m sure if Walmart convinces the City Council to vote for this, they may receive tax breaks or incentives.

44. Sharon, back when I was running for 1st District, I went to a TIF meeting at Lincoln Library. There was a discussion on the new TIF being formed in the south end which included Mrs Ricca’s neighborhood. Of course she and her pals were all giddy with excitement as then candidate Mrs. Moore was there promising them money and improvements and continued sunshine. My mistake was telling them the truth. Their neighborhood was a shitbox and because it has been ignored by the city for well over 30 years, there was no way families were going to buy abandon homes on Greenlawn and Blaine and other streets and fix them up. No business is going to locate there either and in fact over the last 15 years businesses have ran from that area. Walgreens, KFC, Apollo Mart, Abraham’s Amusement, Payless Shoes, Burger King, to name a few mainly because the crime. I also said that making that area a TIF was just the city’s way of basically putting lipstick on a pig and it robs the school district of funds. I was immediately shouted down and debunked by a gentleman who said he was a treasure or comptroller or something for District 150. He told the crowd that TIFs do not hurt District 150 and that 150 is operating in the black with a surplus. Or as one woman shouted: “Who cares about the schools!” Mrs. Moore danced in the crowd saying TIFs do help 150 and neighborhoods. Short of the Warehouse District, I asked her to name one. Again, hindsight says I should have lied my butt off thinking people wanted help or a hand up but I found were people with their hands out….wanting their cut. So Sharon, who might this old guy be working for the District saying TIFs are great!?
    The point is, this guy had his head up Moore’s, well, just say he agreed with everything she was spewing before and after that meeting that day. Because of this guy, and his response, Walmart will go where the stadium is no matter how much squealing the public does. It seems at the Admin office of District 150, once a decision has been made, it’s damn the torpedoes, full steam ahead. I just wish I could remember who that guy was. Watch and see.

45. Hightower: did you read what you posted? Yes Walamrt sells and makes a huge profit but at the expense of the worker. It does not in anyway translate into how Walmart affects the economy. What good is it if Walmart workers work there but live in those muddy fields???? They can’t afford housing without government help.

46. Why are we having the “new Walmart in the community” argument?

    Walmart is NOT new to this community, we know what it is, what it does and what it looks like.

    This is about the School District, the Park District and the City of Peoria taking every dime they can get out of the School District, all to the detriment of the education of the children in this City.

    The rape by TIF has been going on for years, but it’s never been on the front page of the newspaper. We can thank Grenita Lathan for giving us the opportunity to see the true colors of locals who claim to care.

47. Okay Hightower, let’s compare apples to oranges. My point was the dismal wages that WalMart pays its employees and your rebuttal was that WalMart has an efficient sales model. You know who is even MORE efficient? Costco. Since you like Forbes, here is a great article of theirs extolling Costco’s methods of efficiency while paying their employees a liveable wage.

    http://www.forbes.com/sites/rickungar/2013/04/17/walmart-pays-workers-poorly-and-sinks-while-costco-pays-workers-well-and-sails-proof-that-you-get-what-you-pay-for/

    It looks like you might not like clicking on links so here are some excerpts:

    – Costco’s most recent quarterly earnings report reveals a fairly healthy 8 percent rate of growth in year-on-year sales—including a five percent rise in same store sales. Meanwhile, Costco’s primary competitor, Walmart, saw an anemic 1.2 percent rise in sales.

    – Costco pays their employees a livable wage and gets sales per employee at double what Walmart subsidiary Sam’s Club gets from their employees who work for lousy pay.

    Also, let’s look at how profitable Wal Mart is since that’s a good indicator of how efficient it REALLY is with it’s resources:

    – In August, Wal-Mart suffered its ninth consecutive quarter of same-store sales decline in the U.S. That’s more than two years of falling sales — and across a period of time where, let’s admit it, consumer spending hasn’t exactly been on the rebound. The stagnant sales have resulted in stagnant shares — WMT stock is down about 3% this year, and has been basically flat since early 2009.

    – The strength of Costco shows in its recent numbers. That was 9% revenue growth in 2010 and an estimated 13% this year. Earnings also have been moving handily upward, too, from $2.47 EPS in fiscal 2009 to $2.92 in 2010 and $3.30 targeted for 2011. That’s 18% earnings growth in 2010 and 13% targeted for this year.

    http://investorplace.com/2011/10/costco-wal-mart-walmart-cost-wmt/

    Hightower, I am not against profits, efficiency or the use of technology in selling goods, I am against Wal-Mart and everything they stand for. Costco is an example that you can pay people a decent amount while being efficient and creating profits. And they didn’t need to tear down a park in East Peoria to build a store.

48. TIFs are outlawed in California because of the political corruption they caused.

49. I don’t have any particular fondness for Walmart, Target, or Costco, but I fail to understand why a Super Walmart at the Peoria Stadium location would cause Crusens, Alwan, and Super Liquors to fail and close shop.

    Walmart has bad customer service and is loaded with garbage products from China. Last I heard, they don’t serve hot chicken wings like Crusens. They probably won’t have an extensive liquor selection like Super Liquors. Their meat selections will not come anywhere near the variety and quality of Alwan Brothers.

    Competition is good. Local businesses must be smart enough to triumph over the big box stores. They can do it by improving customer service, providing better products made in the USA, and by cultivating loyalty on Facebook.

50. People have been brainwashed into thinking that WalMart is the low price leader when it comes to shopping. That is the bottom line to people in this area.

    Employees standard of living….effect on other business…..the majority don’t care about that. If they can get some pop tarts for 15 cents cheaper, than damnit they’ll shop there.

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