Walmart has the resources to take an entire town government to court, and to stay there on endless appeals, plus refilings of "new" proposals with two commas changed.

Every so often, Walmart tries to get permission to build a store on a particular piece of ground that it's been salivating over near the town where I work. So far, the townships have beaten them off with a stick, that stick being very strict requirements concerning access road improvement and maintenance of same, dealing with the waste water runoff problem that their parking lot would exacerbate (the land they want is currently farmed), and as yet unspecified traffic safety improvements. They want to build on a road which gives access to a state route that is a school district boundary, so buses from two school districts and from a regional private school are on that road 9 months of the year. Believe me, the traffic is already bad enough there.

The local business owners have also banded together to bury the hatchet... in Walmart's grasping paw. They have been joined by the farm preservationists, the chambers of commerce, and the historical society people.

Most of the wheels in the community don't want it, and absolutely none of the neighbors to the site do, nor the parents of the kids who ride those buses.

Yet Walmart keeps coming back, with another petition, followed by another round of meetings and protests. They are indefatigable. They won't take "no" for an answer. There's a store of theirs 10 miles away, and another (on the city bus system spur that comes out this way) 18 miles in the other direction. The feeling is, they want to saturate the region, creating a WalToWalmart.

It sounds to me as if Hercules has tried to come up with a creative way to avoid this constant fighting by using the law to take Walmart out of the ring.