COM 0032.037 2006-2008 - Laserfiche WebLink

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businesses will thrive and others fail. Laws exist outside of the zoning and land use system to control competition that society deems unfair: anti-trust laws, truth-in-labeling laws, and the like. The land use system is not supposed to limit competition to favor certain businesses against others. It is a legitimate use of the land use and zoning powers to establish preferred locations for businesses, and to prevent businesses from getting started in undesiteable locations. For example, it is a perfectly legitimate use of zoning power for a community that is trying to preserve and enhance an existing downtown business core to use zoning to prevent big-box merchants from building at a highway crossroads away from the downtown, so that the downtown remains the primary commercial center. This is the type of zoning battle that has been fought in many communities against big retailers such as Wal-Mart, but it should be based on a policy about the use of land, and the proper location for businesses, not the belief that one group of business owners are more deserving than another. Other laws set the requirements for wages, hows, and health care that corporations must meet. Zoning and other land use laws do not set these standards. Criven these general principles, the Planning Director cannot give a favorable recommendation to an ordinance that would ban superstores everywhere on the island. The combination of a Large departmem store with a section that sells food, under the same roof and with the same ownership, cannot be said to be a bad thing in itself and under all circumstances. It is simply a different form of retail enterprise. It is not something like an illegal drug lab, a casino, or a brothel that a community may ban because it believes it is a harmful activity in itself. An island-wide ban could have the paradoxical effect of creating a monopoly for Wal- Mart in the "superstore" category, given that Wal-Mart will apparently build a superstore on DHI~. property. Unless DIIHL leases another site to a superstore competitor, that would be the only site where a superstore could be built on the island if this ban is enacted. There is reason to be concerned about the location of superstores. They are typically very large in comparison with other retail businesses and can attract very large traffic volumes to a particular area. One particular concern is that a superstore can bring traffic from a large region to an azea that may not have been planned to be a regional commercial center. Some of our MCX zoned areas, for example, may have been planned with the idea that they would have mixed -6-