Go Inglewood.
A bid by the world’s largest corporation to bypass uncooperative elected officials and take its aggressive expansion plans to voters failed Tuesday, as Inglewood residents overwhelmingly rejected Wal-Mart’s proposal to build a colossal retail and grocery center without an environmental review or public hearings.
With all votes counted Tuesday evening, 4,575 Inglewood residents had voted in favor of Wal-Mart’s plan, while 7,049 had voted against it.
There are a lot of winners here: grocery workers, city planners, elected officials, local residents, small businesses and poker players. Really? Poker players? Yeah. They would have dumped their supercenter right in HPark’s parking lot. Not cool.
This measure failed, but it’s yet another example of why direct democracy is a bad idea. We need to do something about this whole initiative thing.