Pet Valu, a small store in Calvert County, Maryland's Dunkirk Town Center shopping strip, is part of a Canada–based chain, but its interior feels locally grown. Three tall shelves stretch into the store's long corridor, stocked from cluttered floor to ceiling with novelty chew toys, rodent cages, and gourmet pet food. My surprise, upon being told that the store has survived since the Town Center's 2007 opening, is apparently not uncommon: "Yeah," said one smiling employee, "we get that a lot."

To be fair, Pet Valu's modest success comes as a surprise only because its biggest neighbor in the Town Center is a store that sells similar products and has a reputation for draining the contents of nearby cash registers: Walmart.

Though magnitudes apart in scope, the Walmart and Pet Valu Dunkirk storefronts share one key feature: their aesthetics and outreach have been bent to the will of Calvert County's long-term development desires. The usual narrative for a small-town Walmart goes like this: Corporate monster parks mega-store at the edge of town, bankrupting mom-and-pop businesses, gridlocking the highway, and killing a once-vibrant community. But Dunkirk — thanks to its unique needs and the foresight of the Calvert County officials who designed and enforced zoning plans and big box ordinances — has upended that narrative.

The Setting

Calvert County, once mostly fields of tobacco and corn, is one of Maryland's smallest counties. In the 2010 census Calvert's population totaled 88,737, compared with neighboring Prince George's County at 863,420 or Anne Arundel County at 537,656. The census-designated place of Dunkirk is a small slice of that geography, with 2,363 residents living within less than seven square miles of land.

Dunkirk lies at the northern edge of the county, the mouth on the funnel of traffic that flows south along the four-lane highway of Route 4, which connects further north to the District of Columbia's Pennsylvania Avenue. In the late 1980s, urban commuters took notice of the county's quiet, rural character and easy access to the city and Capitol Beltway; throughout the 1990s, Calvert exploded with nearly 4 percent population growth per year, one of the fastest rates in the state.

Mike Hall, a Georgetown law student and former Walmart employee whose parents moved to Dunkirk in 1987, witnessed some of that expansion first-hand. "In the late 1990s and early 2000s," Hall said, the county experienced an "influx of D.C. commuters, maybe even Annapolis commuters. People don't work here; they work somewhere else, and they live here to be away from it."

Those commuting families contributed to Dunkirk's upper-middle class demographics. There are no apartment complexes in Dunkirk; new residents moved to single-family homes in large residential developments, with incomes matching property values. As of the 2000 census, more than 80 percent of Dunkirk's homes were occupied by married couples; the median household income was $102,240; and only 0.2 percent of residents — and no families — lived beneath the poverty line.

Commuting and Transportation Problems

Even before the population boom, Calvert County officials worried about the long-term prospects for a transportation grid based on agricultural lifestyles rather than swarms of commuters. "I think, on the 2000 census, Calvert either had the second-longest or longest commuting time in the state," said Greg Bowen, former Calvert County director of planning and zoning, in a phone interview. Commuters who came to Calvert County for the easy road trip found that, just as soon as they arrived, the trip was growing less pleasant.

In 1999, Calvert County commissioners asked the State Highway Administration (SHA) to study the long-term traffic implications of the county's growth. SHA found, based on population numbers at the time as well as expected economic growth, that Route 4 would eventually fail as the county's main artery. By 2025, the study said, rush hour drivers would need as long as 40 minutes to pass through Dunkirk's mere two-mile stretch of Route 4, creating a catastrophic bottleneck at the county's northern end.

"The commissioners have been cautious on this," said Bowen, who worked in the department of planning and zoning for 32 years before his retirement in September 2011. "So much of the economy in Solomon's [Island], south in the county, would be devastated if folks couldn't get down to that area within a reasonable time."

Responding to Big Box Retail

Calvert County's long-term plan to avoid such disaster included the establishment, in 1983, of several "town center" commercial zones. "Before then," Bowen said, "there was a lot of concern that Route 4 would be one strip of commercial centers from one end of the county to the other, much like you find going down Route 1 or 301." The town centers were zoned by 1984; since then, there has been no new commercial rezoning along Route 4. County planners hoped these centers would result in fewer traffic intersections and greater efficiency along the highway.

Wal-Mart and a Giant supermarket were the only two large chain corporations given storefronts in Dunkirk's Town Center. In order to further limit those stores' ability to disrupt traffic flow or economic growth, in the early 2000s Calvert County enacted big box regulations that capped the size of all commercial zoning projects. In small town centers, such as Dunkirk's, projects could not exceed 75,000 square feet.

A 97,000-square-foot Walmart already existed in Prince Frederick, further south in the county where its size could be mitigated by the spread of traffic through other roadways. But the corporation, which had planned on a Dunkirk store even larger than the one in Prince Frederick, did not succumb easily to the county's wishes. Originally, the corporation had intended to build a 144,000-square-foot store in Dunkirk; late in 2004, after the regulations went into effect, Wal-Mart sought approval for a plan of a 74,998-square-foot store constructed next to a 24,153-square-foot "garden center." The two individual properties would have operated their own registers, under the pretense of being separate entities.

Defeat of Wal-Mart's Bigger Box

The move provoked enough negative local press for Dunkirk to be mentioned in the 2005 documentary "Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price," in a list of small American towns resisting the construction of a local Walmart. The corporation's tactics also caught the eye of activists such as Al Norman, who gained national attention for defeating a proposed Walmart in his hometown of Greenfield, Massachusetts, in 1993. "It actually shows an enormous amount of corporate arrogance for any company, I don't care what they're selling, to say to a local community that our business model is more important than your land-use laws," Norman said in a telephone interview.

Norman's website, Sprawl-Busters.com, ran stories about Wal-Mart's Dunkirk plan during its conceptual stages in 2004 and 2005. "I presented the Dunkirk story as an example of a corporation that was forced to back down from a blatant attempt to circumvent local land-use desires," he said. "I thought it was great that Wal-Mart had to back down."

Indeed, after an outpouring of what The Washington Post called "widespread opposition from residents and local officials," Wal-Mart abandoned its dual-store plan. The Dunkirk store opened on July 27, 2007, occupying just 73,890 square feet. (See Figures 1, 2, and 3.) "We were told that it was the smallest Walmart on the East Coast. Everything's contracted, but everything you need is still there," said Hall, who was employed by the store when it opened. Wal-Mart also acquiesced to Dunkirk's commercial appearance code regulations, constructing a building with brick siding and a pitched roof instead of the flat, blue box that adorns the face of most stores.

Consequences of the Smaller Walmart Box

In the five years since that grand opening, the store has not attracted the usual superstore complaints. Long waits are rare along the 14 checkout counters, and parking is plentiful. "The number of customers is pretty minimal," Hall said. "Peak time was never really a worry." So far, Route 4 has not experienced unanticipated levels of traffic congestion at the town center intersection.

The big box ordinances were crafted in the hope of just such as result. "The fear for Dunkirk was that if you built the larger Walmart, a real regional hub, it would draw down traffic from south Anne Arundel and south Prince George's, exacerbating the traffic problems even more," Bowen said. A 75,000-square-foot store isn't small, but county planners intended the restriction to prevent Walmart from being seen as the primary draw for visitors just entering Calvert from the north, so that traffic could still reach the tourism and commercial enterprises in the heart of the county. With the smaller store, Bowen said, "Walmart could have its customers and provide immediate services as a general store, but it wouldn't be so large that it would draw a much larger radius and impact the town in a bigger way."

The Dunkirk location serves only the needs of local Dunkirk residents — but those needs are important to a community with no previous shopping opportunities. Hall repeatedly mentioned Walmart's "one-stop-shop" convenience. Before 2007, Hall said, parents looking to buy their child a bicycle or a laptop, or local sports teams looking for uniforms or equipment, "always had to go out of their way" to find shopping opportunities.

"Walmart didn't replace anything," Hall said. "It just added. This Walmart is sort of special in that it serves this community." Bowen said the planning and zoning department "didn't hear many negative comments" about the store after its construction.

Walmart's Economic and Retail Impacts

The lack of previous storefronts in the Dunkirk area means that Walmart's presence has brought a significant new employment source to the region. Even if the job quality is questionable, according to the county's 2009 Comprehensive Annual Financial Report, Walmart is Calvert County's fifth-largest employer, with approximately 500 employees at the two stores in Dunkirk and Prince Frederick. "Walmart offers good jobs and benefits," Dunkirk store manager Laurie Bennett said in a press release when the store opened, "as well as the opportunity for advancement."

That advancement extends to businesses outside of Walmart, as well. According to Bowen, the county commissioners "changed the regulations to encourage the big boxes to co-locate with other businesses, to help economic development as a whole." For Dunkirk, a limited-size store could generate opportunities for businesses that otherwise had no foothold in the tiny community.

"Walmart keeps people shopping in Dunkirk," Hall said. "If somebody had a mind to open a store that offered something Walmart didn't offer, and put it in that shopping center, I bet their business would do better now."

Which brings things back to Pet Valu. An employee I spoke to attributed the store's prosperity to its stock of "holistic foods" and other niche pet products. The local Walmart, which stocks some general pet supplies, makes residents aware that such needs could be met just around the corner — but because of the size cap and zoning plan, stores like Pet Valu can take advantage of Walmart's limited scope. In this way, the community uses Walmart to grow Dunkirk's business presence, rather than allowing a single megastore to choke away future commercial potential.

Future Concerns Remain

For now, the rapid population growth of the 1990s has been held at bay, due both to continued countywide rezoning and the nationwide economic recession, which Bowen said "dampened down the projected growth" to a small degree. Further growth, though, could force officials to implement new ideas, such as expanding Route 4 into a six-lane highway or constructing additional overpasses and service roads, to preserve Calvert County's economic viability.

To its credit, Calvert County has consistently kept ahead of such factors with every big developmental project, including the Dunkirk Town Center. As Bowen told me, "This was not a case of big corporations convincing county commissioners to do things for their own interest. This was really commissioners taking a look at the big picture of Route 4 — town development, jobs creation — and putting the whole thing together. It's a delicate balancing act."

That balancing act may ultimately fail; even slowed growth may not hold off those ominous 1999 SHA projections forever. But whatever congestion and other fallout may come to Calvert County, it will at least come not through the negative influence of corporate sprawl, but in spite of the careful plans and thoughtful decisions of local officials.

Chuck Sebian-Lander (csebianlander@gmail.com) is a graduate student at American University, working on a master of fine arts degree in creative writing. He was born in Maryland and spent most of his childhood in Calvert County, Maryland, 10 minutes south of Dunkirk. Currently he lives in Silver Spring, Maryland.