PhillyDeals: Giant Wawa plan stirs opposition

Have Wawa's big new stores, with their multiple gas pumps, made the Delaware County-based convenience-store chain a Walmart-sized threat to independent businesses, instead of the hometown champion it used to be?

That's what concerns Bob Wilson. A veteran of 44 years of running gas stations in the area, Wilson is leading efforts against a proposed giant Wawa on the site of E.F. Moore Chevrolet near 11th Avenue on Conshohocken's busy Fayette Street.

"These big corporations are swallowing up everything," Wilson told me, citing Wawa's estimated sales of more than $5 billion a year in gasoline, smokes, Cokes and hoagies, as the privately owned former dairy store morphs into a one-stop gas-eat-go chain.

"We are proposing in investing in the Conshohocken community and redeveloping a site that has been vacant," said Wawa spokeswoman Lori

Bruce. "We have a long-standing tradition of being a good neighbor and citizen in every community we serve, and we bring many lifestyle benefits to consumers and the community."

Is Wawa getting more resistance as its stores grow? "No," Bruce insisted. "Many communities welcome us," and the jobs Wawa provides, she said, citing recent store openings in Paulsboro and Lansdale.

"There's a lot of rowhouses in that area," Wilson said. "There's a road in the back that will take traffic into a smaller street. It's going to be difficult for tanker trucks to leave in that direction." Not to mention the traffic that already backs up Fayette from the Schuylkill bridge every rush hour.

Wilson says he's made a career fighting Big Oil even as he pushes its products.

He was "chased out" of his old, leased King of Prussia Exxon at the start of the 1980s "after they tripled my rent, because I wouldn't play their games and sell gas at their price," he told me. So he "invested everything" in what is now Bob Wilson Gulf. "I own the station, and they can't dictate to me. I've built the business up," Wilson said. "My son is with me. Our mechanic has been with us for many years. We've made it a good part of the neighborhood."

And not just the Wilsons. He mentally walked me up Fayette Street and Butler Pike toward Blue Bell, reviewing the service station owners who arrived before him and are still there: the Bowes, who run an Exxon; the Blacks, with their Sunoco; the Torcinis; and others.

"These guys have built the business from their fathers," Wilson said. "They've worked their whole lives. Now this corporation will swallow things.

"I don't know what it will do to the hoagie shops, the small restaurants. We're just concerned, because if this comes in, it will kill everybody."

Wilson and others drafted a statement, which says, in part: "The fight in Conshohocken signals a sea change in how the local community views Wawa. Whereas once seen as the hometown good guys, Wawa has now crossed over to the dark side, and is now seen as the convenience-store industry's answer to Walmart: A big-box retailer of epic proportions that does more bad than good when it comes to town."

Enough residents questioned the plan at last month's Borough Council meeting that the company scheduled a public meeting of its own Monday night "to address the neighbors' concerns," Borough Manager Fran Marabella told me.

Conshohocken will have the final say. The property would need borough zoning and planning approval to fit a Wawa and service station, Marabella said.

David W. Baldt, the ex-municipal bond manager who the Securities and Exchange Commission says wrongly warned his daughter to dump her shares in his $5 billion Center City-based portfolio during the 2008 credit-market meltdown, finally got his say in court Monday.

In the first day of a hearing before federal Administrative Law Judge Robert G. Mahony, Baldt defended himself from insider-trading accusations that could cost him his securities license and his 30-year career as a bond picker who cultivated a reputation for meticulous, research-based investments.

But Baldt said he hadn't given away any secrets when he talked with his daughter on Sept. 17, 2008. He said the "25-year-old girl," employed at a giant Wall Street firm, suffered from "extreme anxiety" and felt "extreme risk aversion." He said if she "was not my daughter, I would have responded exactly the same way,"he testified.