Super Wal-Mart and Sam's Club Coming to Cortland County?
And East Syracuse?

Wal-Mart's front man flew into Syracuse on Monday (3/11/2) to meet with the people in East Syracuse on Tuesday and with Linda Hartsock at the BCD/IDA on Wednesday (tomorrow) to scout a location and discuss bringing a Super Wal-Mart and a Sam's Club to Cortland County.

The normal procedure for Wal-Mart is to come into an area secretly and buy up the land they need (25 acres or so) before word gets out and land prices soar. They prefer an area along the interstate that is not developed but has potential. They know that in Cortland County the BCD/IDA is working to develop the Route 281 corridor from Preble south. Wal-Mart likes to have other businesses near them to bring in more traffic that helps all of them.

They will first look at their present location on 281 and see if they could enlarge that into a Superstore. If that is not feasible then they look for a larger location and abandon the first location. This may mean that they would build their superstore somewhere else along 281 and leave their present location empty. How this would affect K-Mart and other stores at that location is unclear. The possible locations are in Preble or Homer and possibility further south. Not long ago they were refused in Ithaca and now they want to build somewhere in Cortland County.

Due to the secrecy surrounding this I would expect all the participants to deny everything and say it is just an unfounded rumor. However, my source reliability on this information is extremely high but as you would expect it has not been confirmed by any of the participants.

I 'may' have more information on this later and if so I will flag it as an update.

Frank Hogg
3/12/02