By Reid Forgrave
The Cincinnati Enquirer

HARRISON - Barbara Rounds-Kugler, a Vietnam War veteran and former Harrison city councilwoman, is rallying her troops.

The foe is Wal-Mart, the retail goliath she and others fear will ruin Harrison's small-town atmosphere. It's a battle also being waged elsewhere in the Tristate and nationally.

"Harrison is a very proud, family-oriented community, and we don't want to live on Colerain Avenue - RIGHT?" shouts Rounds-Kugler, leader of the grass-roots group Harrison Residents for Responsible Development. "Think about having a Wal-Mart on those 54 acres right now and adding 5,000 cars a day to New Haven Road. Is that what you want?"

"NO!" respond more than 100 raucous residents.

This group is like many others springing up in suburbs around the Tristate and the nation as Wal-Mart shifts its focus from building in smaller rural towns to peppering America's suburbs with Supercenters - one-stop super-shops, often in excess of 200,000 square feet, and complete with banks, McDonald's restaurants, groceries, clothing, optometrists, salons and other stores-within-the-store.

At least seven other new Supercenters are under way or proposed in the Tristate, the latest in Florence, where officials said Monday that Wal-Mart will build a Supercenter less than a mile from its current store on Houston Road. This evening, Milford City Council will conduct hearings about plans for a Supercenter in that Clermont County city. There are Supercenters open in Dry Ridge, Ky., and Aurora.

Wal-Mart spokesman Keith Morris says the Bentonville, Ark.-based corporation sees the Tristate as a promising area for stores "closer and closer to that Cincinnati area" as the company's growth overall evolves from the mainly rural areas where it began.

But with concerns over traffic, sprawl and loss of small-town atmosphere already high in many suburban areas, the prospect of a massive new Supercenter often stirs opposition.

Foes in Milford, Deerfield

In Harrison, which has spent more than $1.3 million to spruce up downtown, residents fear that a proposed Wal-Mart Supercenter on a patch of farmland near Interstate 74 could hurt the downtown of family-owned businesses in the western Hamilton County community of 10,000 people.

"We just went through all this revitalization of downtown, and now Wal-Mart could ruin that," said Denise Frazier, co-owner of Harrison Home Bakery. "I just feel there's no positive from Wal-Mart coming here. I don't think there's a single one of these businesses saying, 'Hip-hip hooray, Wal-Mart is coming in.' We're just trying to preserve what we have."

Near the Indiana border and within a 15-minute drive of two other Wal-Mart stores, the Harrison City Council has listened to the residents' rumblings. City Council in April placed a 180-day suspension on new building and zoning permits for buildings larger than 100,000 square feet.

That allows time for a fiscal impact study on how another big-box development would affect city finances and the scores of smaller local businesses.

Collette Thompson, Director of Main Street Harrison Inc. (Glenn Hartong photo)

In Harrison, the downtown is quaint, full of buildings constructed in the 1800s.

Business owners here say you build a thriving community through a lively downtown. Promoters of downtown think that all their work - more than $1.3 million in recent years in road improvements, new sidewalks and historic light posts - might go to waste.

"Is it worth saving four or five dollars per shopping trip when in the long run you're losing the identity of a small town?" asks Collette Thompson, director of Main Street Harrison, a nonprofit group dedicated to downtown preservation and revitalization.

Vocal opponents are also active in Milford and in Deerfield Township.

In Milford, almost 400 people watched the city planning commission in February vote unanimously against a rezoning proposal for a 203,000-square-foot Supercenter on Ohio 28. The decision now goes to City Council.

In Deerfield, trustees are holding a series of town meetings but have yet to decide on a 203,000-square-foot Supercenter, in the proposed Shoppes of Deerfield development on Mason-Montgomery Road in southern Warren County. Despite protests from 150 residents, the township zoning commission recommended the site plan in February with 44 conditions on the store's size, parking lot and layout. Residents have hired an attorney to help their fight.

In Fort Wright, a 183,197-square-foot Supercenter is set to open by September. The beginning of construction took almost three years after the store was proposed because city officials demanded $2.6 million in road improvements to satisfy local concerns. The city also prohibited gasoline stations and fast-food restaurants around the site.

Stores' offer: time and money

For its part, Wal-Mart says it helps communities in several ways - by drawing shoppers from surrounding communities, by increasing tax revenues, by increasing property taxes, by adding jobs, by paying for infrastructure improvements. And besides saving money, the Supercenters can help suburbanites save time, it says.

"Once the store is open, it's matter of convenience," Morris says. "Now you have a shopping destination that's closer, it limits additional trips, it saves time and money. People have repeatedly expressed that this format works."

Supercenters don't always mean a fight. In West Chester Township, a Wal-Mart superstore planned for Cincinnati-Dayton Road at I-75 ran into little opposition from residents because the land already was zoned for commercial use, developer Dan Neyer says.

Wal-Mart bought 28 acres April 15 to build a 204,000 square-foot Supercenter this summer, Neyer says. The anchor for the $60 million retail and commercial center will open next spring.

But nationally, Wal-Mart has had setbacks in recent months.

Voters in the southern California suburbs of San Marcos and Inglewood voted overwhelmingly in March and in April to reject new Wal-Mart stores in their communities. A developer in Westfield, Ind., north of Indianapolis, recently dropped plans for a new Wal-Mart Supercenter, citing lack of community support. Steamboat Springs, Colo., recently voted for a moratorium on big-box retail stores. In the town of Sequim, Wash., near the Olympic National Park, residents have asked courts to review a new Wal-Mart's environmental impact on the Dungeness River.

Harrison fears loss of identity

In Harrison, some residents say they fear becoming a dot on the corporate American landscape of fast-food joints and concrete shopping complexes.

"If you live in this town, you know the name of the people who run your hardware store," said Dave Small, owner of Small's Do It Best Hardware Store.

"With all these big boxes, pretty soon it will become generic America. It's hard to find those unique little mom-and-pop stores that give a flavor to the community. ... People are trying to hold on to that small-town feel, that feeling of community."

Residents who are against building more big-box stores here assert three specific ways another retail giant will hurt western Hamilton County:

• Traffic: They say a Wal-Mart built before New Haven Road is widened will worsen the bottlenecks that constantly clog the road and the New Haven Road bridge. This will further hurt police, firefighters and ambulance drivers who already wait on the bridge while cars make room.

• Local business: They say the myriad functions of a Supercenter will put pressure on smaller businesses that can't compete. These small businesses are essential to the small-town character here, they say.

• City finances: They say Wal-Mart will actually hurt the city because the services it demands from the city outweigh the tax benefits.

The proposed Wal-Mart in Harrison can't move forward without a zone change. The land it wants to use is currently zoned residential.

Janilee Beck, an employee at Village Pharmacy in downtown Harrison, says she always shops at Wal-Mart in Aurora, Ind., and on Colerain Avenue for clothes, food and gifts for her grandchildren.

She'd be one of thousands in the community who likely would shop at a new Wal-Mart here.

But even Beck doesn't want it in Harrison.

"I've seen what they do to small towns, and I don't want to see that happen to Harrison," Beck said. "The ones on Colerain and in Aurora are close enough. Why do we need one within every 10 miles?"

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Brenna Kelly, John Kiesewetter and Dan Sewell contributed to this report. E-mail rforgrave@enquirer.com