DC Goverment helping Wal-Mart drive Ga Ave stores out of business

Respect DC is reporting that DC's decision to support Wal-Mart by relocating a bus stop to directly in front of the store and installing pay parking meters on Peabody Street has devastated nearby small businesses. One business owner was quoted as saying "I have customers that tell me, ‘I want to come to your store, but the bus drops me at Walmart.’"

This strikes me as a city decision to move small stores out of the way for Wal-Mart, just as they move low income housing out of the way for new condo projects. With Muriel Bowser as front-runner for Mayor and solidly in Wal-Mart's pocket, more of the same seems to be coming unless something bug happens to promote either a union at or a boycott of the Ga Ave Wal-Mart.

Small business owners are screaming for tax abatement and the removal of parking restrictions that favor Wal-Mart at their expense, but their complaints are going to politicians whose election campaigns have been generously larded with Wal-Mart "contributions."

Wal-Mart offered to let those shopping elsewhere use their underground garage, but that means forcing those already tired from a day at work to walk through Wal-Mart to shop elsewhere. It's the same if you take the bus-it lets off right in front of Wal-Mart. I guess this is what all that campaign cash from Wal-Mart to a corrupt Mayor and corrupt members of the City Council has purchased.All street parking on that part of Ga Ave has been taken away, but there are allegations that illegally parked cars at Wak-Mart are often not ticketed.

Free parking at Wal-Mart, paid parking everywhere else, plus the bus gets off at Wal-Mart. This is one of the most extreme cases of a city being in Wal-Mart's pocket I have ever seen. Wonder if it will become DC's equivalent of "Bridgegate," where NJ's GOP governor shut down traffic lanes on a bridge to punish residents of a district that voted against his re-election?