Traverse City Record-Eagle

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THE ISSUE

-- Acme planners OK Meijer plan

Our view

-- The Battle of Acme may be over

February 5, 2012

Our view: Battle of Acme may be over

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The Battle of Acme is apparently nearing an end, and after six years or so of wrangling over Meijer Inc.'s plans for a big-box store along M-72, both sides appear ready to move on with getting a store built, local residents hired and the doors open.

In many ways, this was a fight that didn't need to happen, but for both sides there were issues on which they were unwilling to compromise.

Meijer, as one company official put it early on in the dispute, wanted to build the kind of store Meijer customers expected to see, including a familiar layout and amenities.

For their part, Acme officials said the 214,000-square-foot store did not match the image township residents had laid out in a series of visioning sessions a couple years earlier. Residents had said they wanted new retail to reflect a village-like atmosphere, like nearby Elk Rapids, and worried about the nearly 800,000 square feet of retail that was to follow.

In many ways this was a battle fought not just for Acme Township but for every small community in northern Michigan that wanted to have a real say in the plans of big-box stores or other large developments coming to town.

They wanted to be the ones who chose how their town would look 10 years down the road and were looking for ways to enforce their vision.

As township officials dug in, Meijer secretly spent more than $100,000 to fund front groups to influence township elections in 2005 and 2007 and filed lawsuits against individual township officials and township residents whom the company deemed obstructive.

Some Acme officials sued back, and in the end Meijer and Village at Grand Traverse LLC developers paid more than $4 million to settle several lawsuits related to their actions and nearly $200,000 to settle campaign finance violations.

Now, township planners have finally approved the first phase of the development and the decision goes next to the township board. It will be on its agenda for Tuesday, though it's unclear if the board will have time to take final action then.

Phase I of the proposed 182-acre Village at Grand Traverse development calls for a 214,000-square-foot Meijer store that would anchor what could evolve into more than 1 million square feet of retail space at M-72 and Lautner Road.

No one is pretending that Acme got all it wanted.

Meijer is still planning a big store with more retail to come, and it hardly looks like a village setting.

But township officials and some residents who battled the early plans seem resigned to the fact that planners have vetted Meijer's intentions and that it's time to move on.

Denny Rohn, president of Concerned Citizens of Acme Township, said the group still thinks the project is too big but "it is what we were left with.

"I think the planning commission did the best that they could to protect the pieces of the township that were threatened by it," she said.

Meijer appears ready to move on and build the store it had hoped to open years and years ago. Many residents in Acme and beyond, including people in Elk Rapids, Williamsburg and Kalkaska, will be happy to have new shopping choices if and when the Acme Meijer store opens, and there's no doubt dozens and dozens of area residents will have the opportunity for new jobs.

As an economic boon, there is little doubt Meijer will be a big hit.

But it will come at a cost.

Many Acme residents fear a large Meijer store and an additional 800,000 square feet of retail (the Grand Traverse Mall is 590,000 square feet of leasable space) will beget lots of strip-type development along M-72.

They worry that in the end, their township of just 4,700 or so will look more like U.S. 31 south of Traverse City than Elk Rapids.

They may be right.

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