Big retail stores are not what give a town its soul

September 8, 2004

By JOHN CROWLEY

Passing through Gilroy last week, I was able to get a glimpse at Petaluma's potential future.

Talk a walk in downtown Gilroy and you can see remnants of what its past used to be before Wal-Mart, Target and the surrounding strip malls sucked the life out. What was once a charming town with a vibrant main street and downtown is now a shell of it former existence where every fifth store is for rent and most of the others are occupied by a motley assortment of unusual retail stores clinging to life -- not the kind of place you or I want downtown Petaluma be.

I do not support the expansion of the Petaluma Village Premium Outlets. I believe the reasons tendered to support the rationale for the expansion are based on false pretenses.

On Aug. 11, there was a full-page advertisement in the Argus-Courier in support of the outlet mall expansion. The gist of it was that the Petaluma coffers are losing tax dollars to our neighboring cities.

In order to bolster the argument for the expansion, the advertisement quoted such dollar leakage statistics as "100 percent of the population leave Petaluma" to watch movies. A rather ludicrous thing to quote since the outlet mall expansion would have zero effect on this statistic. The next highest statistic quoted was the high percentage of computer equipment that is not bought in Petaluma. The reality is that a huge and growing percentage of all computer equipment is bought online -- again the outlet mall expansion won't affect this statistic much. The exponential growth of online retail is a compelling argument that we will rely less and less on bricks and mortar stores.

One of the things that the leakage study did not address was "reverse leakage." There was no mention of the fact that an enormous amount of money is spent by people coming into Petaluma from our neighboring cities. One of the reasons that people come to Petaluma, either to live or visit, is because it's one of the few towns for many miles with a real soul and a real downtown that is not dominated by shopping malls.

I would ask the City Council and business community here in Peta-luma to consider the true impact of opening a Wal-Mart or similar store at the outlet mall. Only recently Toys-R-Us has announced that it has thrown in the towel. That seemingly solid and ubiquitous toy store is going out of the toy business; resigned to that fact that it has been beaten by Wal-Mart.

If I were a retail store owner here in Petaluma I would be very nervous for my future. This is not just going to affect the small stores, it's going to have a massive impact on all stores, no matter what the size. Other stores, of similar and lesser might, will surely follow in the footsteps of Toys-R-Us.

Target has just signed a preliminary agreement to open a store on the Kenilworth site and Kohl's will soon be opening a huge store on the site of the old cinemas. How many mega-stores does Petaluma need?

I'd like to think that, in future years, people will want to be in Petaluma (and spend their money) not because we have a strip mall at either end of our town, but because we have reasonable town planners who can see beyond the short-term needs and look not just five years into the future but 30, 40 or even 50.

If the City Council does pass this and we do get a Wal-Mart, there is one thing I do hope for; and that is that they put up a plaque with the names of the City Council members who ushered this in so that my children and their children can know who was responsible for turning Petaluma in to a ghost town.