Naked City

Wal-Mart opposition is spreading almost as fast as the retailer's site-selection excursions across town. In Southwest Austin, the fight against the retailer's proposed big box atop the aquifer, at MoPac and Slaughter Lane, gets cranked up a few notches this week with the Save Barton Creek Association's special screening of Store Wars: When Wal-Mart Comes to Town, an award-winning documentary of a Virginia town's battle against the discount retailer. The $12-a-head benefit (tickets available at www.noaquiferbigbox.com) is at 4pm Friday at the Alamo Drafthouse Downtown, 409 Colorado. Author Jim Hightower, whose new book, Thieves in High Places, includes a chapter on Wal-Mart, will address the crowd following the screening.

Meanwhile, five miles east of the aquifer battleground, Park Ridge Homeowners Assoc. leaders are going over anti-Wal-Mart talking points to be addressed at a Zoning and Platting Commission hearing on Tuesday, Sept. 9. The group is fighting the discount retailers' plans to build a Supercenter on the southwest corner of I-35 and Slaughter, currently the home of a trailer community whose residents are scrambling to find somewhere else to go before an army of bulldozers rumbles across the terrain. Both Z.A.P. Chair Betty Baker and the developer, Endeavor Real Estate Group (also the developer of the aquifer Wal-Mart), have argued publicly that the Parkridge case is, or should be, about whether general retail zoning, for any user, is appropriate on the interstate, not about the Beast from Bentonville -- but foes of the aquifer project have vowed to oppose city approval of any Wal-Mart until the retailer and Endeavor address their concerns about the MoPac project.

And now comes word of another South Austin Wal-Mart Supercenter -- this one proposed for the north side of Ben White, between Congress and I-35. This, too, is scheduled for Z.A.P. consideration on Tuesday, as a sliver of the designated parcel requires a zoning change. Needless to say, the South River City Citizens neighborhood group -- no stranger to development battles -- is in strategic-planning mode after being caught off guard when the item appeared on Z.A.P.'s agenda two weeks ago. SRCC President Tim Mahoney says he and other neighborhood reps are meeting this week with Wal-Mart's Austin lawyer, Richard Suttle, to review the site plan. "I don't know what kind of leverage we have at this point, but certainly we're concerned about traffic impact and the effect a Wal-Mart will have on South Congress merchants," Mahoney said. "This is a Wal-Mart attack on South Austin."