Thursday, August 05, 2004

Corporate welfare for Wal-Mart from Champaign, Illinois?

The Champaign-Urbana News-Gazette has this story on how the City of Champaign has agreed to build a new road to connect up a to-be-built Wal-Mart Supercenter with the rest of the big box retail sprawl around the interstate.

The cost? Oh, $2.2 million.

The cost of a nice elementary school. Or 22 well-paid police officers.

Wal-Mart will kick in half a million (so nice of them), leaving the City of Champaign and the County of Champaign expected to pick up about 800 grand each.

Just so Wal-Mart can build another store to suck up more local money and send it to Arkansas.

That smells like bad public policy to me.


1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Yes, that's true. But how much acreage does this supercenter take up?