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James Lighthizer, Civil War Preservation Trust president, visited Fredericksburg last week. |
BY CLINT SCHEMMER
James Lighthizer says he has no beef with Wal-Mart Stores Inc. as a company, and admires its business savvy.
But he does have a big problem with where it plans to build a Supercenter in eastern Orange County: on part of the Wilderness battlefield within a cannon-shot of Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park.
Lighthizer's Civil War Preservation Trust--with other national, state and local groups--has been pressing Orange officials and Wal-Mart to locate the retail center elsewhere along State Route 3, farther from the battlefield. On the eve of the Orange supervisors' vote this week on the issue, he still believes a compromise is within reach.
"We just want Wal-Mart to do the right thing here," the CWPT president said in an interview while visiting Fredericksburg late last week. "All we're asking is for them to be good corporate citizens."
Likewise, Lighthizer believes the Orange Board of Supervisors could choose a different path, though he doesn't sound optimistic that it will.
"Orange County can have it all," he said. "The supervisors can preserve the battlefield, encourage tourism, promote economic development and have a well-planned retail project where people can shop."
He noted that the trust, its allies and the National Park Service are willing
Trust spokesman Jim Campi said more than 10,000 people have written letters and e-mails to Wal-Mart and the Orange supervisors urging them to find another site for the 138,000-square-foot Supercenter, proposed for a site a quarter mile from the national park.
Lighthizer appealed to both parties, principally Wal-Mart, to use "common sense."
"Wal-Mart is a national corporation. They don't need this controversy," he said. "According to what I read in The Wall Street Journal, they're trying to change their image. And they've still got a chance to be heroes here.
"Wal-Mart shouldn't be involved in destroying, or denigrating, this very significant part of American history. The Wilderness was the beginning of [Union Gen. Ulysses S.] Grant's Overland Campaign, the beginning of the end of the Civil War."
The trust chief pointed out that Wal-Mart changed its mind about building a store at George Washington's boyhood home in Stafford County in 1996.
"Wal-Mart saw the light at Ferry Farm. In Orange, it ought to know better--and do better," he said.
A former Maryland legislator and Cabinet member and elected county official, Lighthizer said he understands Orange's need for more taxes to pay for government facilities and services.
But the county risks doing great harm to an invaluable asset, the national park--the most heavily visited tourist destination in Orange, he said. "The battlefield, with its heritage tourism, is a low-impact economic engine for the county," he said.
The Wal-Mart project will greatly increase traffic congestion and fuel more strip-center sprawl, creating problems just like those experienced farther east on Route 3 in Spotsylvania County, he said.
"If this Wal-Mart were proposed in the middle of a subdivision, it wouldn't happen, because residents' quality of life would be more obviously affected."
Wal-Mart's spokesmen have said available acreage, road access and existing commercial zoning make the Wilderness tract, owned by JDC Ventures of Vienna, the only one in the Route 3 corridor that will work.
Nonsense, Lighthizer said: "Zoning is not a significant problem. Most any other site, within a mile or so of this one, would get our support. And rarely are Virginia counties reluctant to rezone land for economic development."
wildernesswalmart.com orangewalmart.com Clint Schemmer: 540/368-5029
Email: cschemmer@freelancestar.com
