An interesting bill now before the California General Assembly would better inform municipalities’ decisions about big-box retailers:

“[S]tate Sen. Richard Alarcon (D-Sun Valley) has introduced legislation that would require large retailers that sell groceries to pay for economic impact studies that could be used to kill any future expansion. Unions and other Wal-Mart critics say such stores hurt the economy because they pay low wages and squeeze out smaller retailers.

The bill would prohibit a city or county from approving any store larger than 100,000 square feet that also devotes at least 10% of its space to selling groceries, if an economic report shows that the surrounding community would be harmed.

It would require Wal-Mart or other superstores to pay for the studies, although they would have no say in choosing which independent consultant would be hired by local officials. Economic and environmental impact reports can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Alarcon said local communities, dazzled by the prospect of huge sales tax revenues, sometimes don’t think rationally before accepting big-box stores. When he was a Los Angeles city councilman in the mid-1990s, Alarcon said, he helped steer a Wal-Mart to a mall in Panorama City rather than to a former General Motors plant, which became a mall. He said the compromise allowed both places to flourish.

“Wal-Mart almost literally has the effect of creating a black hole and sucking all the economic energy of some of the smaller businesses in the community,” Alarcon said. “A mistake some smaller communities make is they fail to take into account the effect on the community as a whole.”

[Robert Salladay writing in the LA Times, via Chicago Tribune]

The article also mentions that Gov. Davis had signed a law barring tax incentives for big boxes — a huge problem in California, where municipalities fall over themselves to snag sales taxes in a state deprived of property taxes — unless “sales tax revenue from the big-box store is shared by the winning and losing cities.” Tax base sharing, but on the sly. I like it.