Circuit City to the Rescue?

I’ve noticed over the last few weeks that the Circuit City expected in the former Staples building in the K-Mart Plaza on Route 22 has been boarded up. The members of the Economic Development Committee (mostly Frank Stabile Sr.) patted themselves hard on the back at the April EDC meeting, claiming that they had met with Circuit City officials and been instrumental in the corporate leaders’ decision to locate a new store in North Plainfield.

“We jogged ‘em, and that’s why we have Circuit City there,” said EDC Chair Florence Mannion.

Mr. Stabile prognosticated that with Circuit City in place, other corporate medium and big-boxes would be sure to follow and fill up other vacancies, including the soon-to-close K-Mart/Sears store. Mr. Stabile remarked on the “odd shape” of the property, “L-shaped,” and “lots of frontage with no depth” which makes it unworkable for big box stores like Lowe’s, although he said Home Depot (currently located a mile east at the Watchung Square Mall) will redesign stores to fit them into odd lots.

I was skeptical of those claims - standard operating procedure without seeing some documentation. I’d also heard alternate versions: that company officials found their reception in North Plainfield less than warm and welcoming.

Plus, the luxury electronics market has taken a serious hit with the economic downturn - fancy new televisions drop down the priority list when food, gas, housing, health care and credit card debt take up most of a family budget. So I wondered if Circuit City would follow through and actually open its doors, or if chickens were being counted pre-hatching.

Turns out, Circuit City has put itself up for sale, floundering financially and having trouble attracting bidders to buy. Latest news is, it may be under SEC investigation.

I don’t hold this against the EDC members.

Maybe they did do a good pitch, and maybe the corporate honchos were really eager to come to North Plainfield, and just got walloped by a bad economy.

It’s the apparent mindset of the EDC members that’s troubling, the sense of looking outside and above the community for corporate saviors to come in and revive the tax base with commercial ratables.

It’s the lack of awareness of national and global trends, and the lack of vision to see how North Plainfield might fit into those national and global trends in ways that create jobs and strengthen community self-reliance.

EDC Co-chair Tom Fagan and another EDC member started off the meeting by chit-chatting about the weather, and then ridiculing Al Gore and the entire notion of climate change: “It’s cold, they say it’s global warming! It’s hot, they say it’s global warming!”

But climate change deniers among credible scientists and policy-makers - even among oil, coal, gas and nuclear industry leaders - are getting to be fewer and farther between every day.

The evidence is in; the case is closed; it’s up to humans to adjust and prepare as best we can.

And that adjustment and preparation will have to be at the local level. Right in places like North Plainfield, with decisions made by regular people serving on ordinary little committees like the Economic Development Committee.

They can size up the challenges and think about the resources (including the vacant shopping centers) the community has. They can start to make plans for a green, sustainable local economy; plans to cut energy use at the schools and municipal buildings; plans to incubate small local producers of food, clean water and energy; plans to recruit solar panel or energy-efficient small appliance manufacturing businesses; plans to establish job training programs for clean energy installation and maintenance; plans to foster a local service economy to provide locally for the needs of aging seniors. There’s huge untapped potential for identifying and planning to meet the vital community needs of the future, and there are huge reservoirs of human creativity and old-fashioned, sleeve-rolling, let’s get-it-done go-to-it-ness all around us - potential and reservoirs that could be coordinated by the Economic Development Committee and other Borough boards and commissions.

Or…

Or they can keep sitting around cracking jokes about Al Gore, wishing for Circuit City to come riding in to the rescue…right up until Circuit City goes bankrupt, and they’re left casting around for another corporate knight in shining armor.

Over, and over again.