Plans by Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (Bentonville, Ark.) to open its first New York City store, in the borough of Staten Island, have fallen through.
Cedarwood Development (Akron, Ohio), the real estate company that was hoping to develop the site, said it was dropping the project because it would have cost too much to remove toxic chemicals from the location on Richmond Valley Road.
But opponents who fought against Wal-Mart's plans to open on Staten Island asserted that the plan had been dropped because of widespread community opposition.
“The only thing toxic on the site was the lack of public support that the store had,” said Richard Lipsky, coordinator of the Neighborhood Retail Alliance, a union-backed group that is the main anti-Wal-Mart coalition in New York.
Many Staten Island residents opposed the Wal-Mart store because they feared it would greatly increase traffic, while the city's labor unions have battled Wal-Mart's plans, asserting that its wages are too low and might undercut unionized supermarkets.
According to The Staten Island Advance, Cedarwood dropped its plans because of the cost of an environmental cleanup at the 18-acre site where Lucent Technologies (Murray Hill, N.J.), the owner of the site, once recycled telecommunications equipment.
“The remediation program needed at the site has caused a change in the site's configuration to a point where it is no longer suitable for a Wal-Mart store,” said Philip H. Serghini, a senior community affairs manager for Wal-Mart. “We continue to consider our options in Staten Island and throughout the five boroughs.”
In February 2005, Wal-Mart dropped plans to open a store in the borough of Queens after it faced intense opposition from Queens residents and labor unions. And it sought to bring Wal-Mart to another site on Staten Island, but those plans have largely been frustrated by concerns about federal wetlands.