GILROY
– Former City Council candidate Bruce Morasca will be the front
man for a petition drive seeking to bring to a popular vote the
proposal for Northern California’s first Wal-Mart Supercenter.
GILROY – Former City Council candidate Bruce Morasca will be the front man for a petition drive seeking to bring to a popular vote the proposal for Northern California’s first Wal-Mart Supercenter.
Roughly 20 Gilroy residents and union interests met at popular local watering hole the Krazy Koyote Thursday night, continuing discussions about a petition drive they announced just days after City Council delayed the approval of the controversial project.
In addition to naming Morasca spokesman, the group also endorsed a plan to spend the next two weeks garnering signatures in front of downtown establishments and Gilroy supermarkets and drug stores, businesses anti-Wal-mart activists say could go under if a Supercenter is allowed in Gilroy.
“We’re going to get 1,000 signatures, but I think we can do that real easily,” Morasca said.
“I think 2,300 signatures is a possibility, and I think that would be a good number because that’s about what it
takes to get on City Council.”
Moras-ca, who ran on an open space and livable wage platform in the 2003 City
Council election, has been chosen to speak for the group.
The Morgan Hill grocery store worker finished in last place in November with less than 8 percent of the vote.
Wal-Mart is undergoing an architecture and site review for its 220,000-square-foot grocery selling version of its regular discount store. The store would move from its existing Arroyo Circle location near Gilroy Premium Outlets into the Pacheco Pass Center at U.S. 101 and Highway 152 across from Costco and Lowe’s.
A majority of Council appears ready to approve the project after the retail giant jumps through one last series of, in some cases unprecedented, hoops.
Among other things, Wal-Mart is being asked to remodel its charitable giving program and implement an aggressive local hiring campaign.
But little of this seems to be appeasing the store’s harshest critics who say Wal-Mart will unfairly crush competition and create economic hardship in Gilroy.
In the petition, the group asks City Council to commission a new economic impact report, disclose “full traffic impacts of the Wal-Mart Supercenter especially on Sixth Street” and let the citizens of Gilroy vote at the next General Election on whether they want a Supercenter.
Several economic impact reports exist, but they have serious shortcomings. One is 12 years old and does not factor in the impacts of a Supercenter, others are either funded by anti-Wal-Mart union leaders or Wal-Mart itself.
Meanwhile, Councilmen Paul Correa and Charlie Morales distanced themselves from petitioners Friday after it was reported they had attended the group’s first meeting.
Correa and Morales said they were there to lend an open ear to discussions, but neither man said they helped draft the petition and neither man said he would actively seek signatures.
“I was a listening party only,” Morales said. “There’s a lot of good and valid points out there that people are making about this, and we have to be mindful of that.”
