The day of reckoning for the proposal to build a new Wal-Mart store on the South Side has been delayed again.
A vote of the City Council’s Zoning Committee was scheduled for 10 a.m. Thursday, but the committee’s chairman, Alderman Daniel Solis (25th), said proponents of the plan asked him to postpone the vote.
“They either don’t have the votes or it is too close to call and they don’t want to risk it,” Solis said Wednesday afternoon.
The committee vote already had been postponed once last month to allow for further discussions between local labor union leaders and officials for the non-union company.
A Wal-Mart spokesman, Steve Restivo, declined to comment on whether the company had sought to avert an unfavorable vote in the committee on Thursday.
“We’re going to use this time to foster even more support for the quality jobs and the affordable groceries that Chicago residents know that Wal-Mart will deliver,” he said.
The Chicago Federation of Labor, which has called on Wal-Mart to pay better wages, issued a statement protesting the latest delay.
“We are puzzled,” said the labor group’s secretary-treasurer, Jorge Ramirez. “Postponing the vote does nothing to bring Wal-Mart back to discuss residents’ concerns about wages and community relations.”
Labor leaders and company officials had met recently but could not hammer out an agreement to allow for Wal-Mart’s second store in Chicago.
“As long as we keep [the proposal] alive, there is some hope that something can be worked out,” Solis said.
The new Wal-Mart, in the 9th Ward, would anchor a new development called Pullman Park. The project would be constructed on a vacant site bordered roughly by West 104th and 111th Streets, South Woodlawn Avenue and the Bishop Ford Expressway.
Mayor Richard M. Daley and the ward’s alderman, Anthony Beale, strongly support the plan. But facing re-election next year, many aldermen fear a backlash from labor unions that spent millions of dollars in the last election, in 2007, to unseat council members who disagreed with them on the Wal-Mart issue.