editorial 4-23-08

Editorial

It’s time for Newport to get involved

It seems only a matter of common sense that, if big box retailers like Lowe’s and Wal-Mart are contemplating locations just across the city line on the Newport-Derby Road, the city of Newport should seek a seat at the table when their Act 250 permits are debated.

Yet when one of Newport’s more enterprising retailers made that request Monday night, with specific regard to Lowe’s, the council went into a defensive crouch.  It bobbed, weaved, threw some weak jabs at a visitor from the Preservation Trust as an interfering outsider and finally, as our story puts it, moved on to other items without taking any action.

Alas.

We would remind Newport’s aldermen of a bit of their own history. Fifteen years ago, when the Derby Mall was up for 250 review, Newport City came rushing in at the last possible moment, pleading for “party status” at the hearings that would give them the right to take part in the debate and, should the need arise, to appeal the district environment commission’s decision.

The city got limited standing at the hearings, and the mall’s potential effect on Newport’sMain Street became a central issue.  Developers agreed to join with city merchants in a joint marketing scheme, to help establish a “trolley” service from the mall’s big parking lots to downtown Newport, even offered to pony up $25,000 to help Newport’s merchants hire a marketing consultant.

We’ll never know whether any of this would have helped, because the mall never got built.  It was slated for the corner of Route 5 and Interstate 91, and its financial projections rested heavily on Canadian business.  As the Canadian dollar slumped, the mall’s subscribing retail chains pulled out. 

The aldermen might also consider the more recent history of a neighboring community, the town of Barton.

As the debate over the Sheffield wind farm project heated up, the Barton selectmen sat on their hands, seeing no particular reason to seek party status before the state’s Public Service Board.  By the time opposition to the project got itself organized in Barton, it was too late to ask for party status.  Except in the very limited matter of getting the bits and pieces of the huge towers through town, Barton’s residents will get to look at the towers, without having had the opportunity to speak out against them — or for them. 

Newport’s political leaders need to cut the mopery and get involved in the 250 process.  To do so is not necessarily to oppose the big retailers.

But to stay in their current defensive crouch, to remain silent while the fate of the city’s retail sector is decided, is not to take a position of safe neutrality.  It is to cast a unanimous vote in favor of big boxes, and to abandon any chance to so much as influence the terms of surrender. — C.B.