Does Kansas City really want Menards?

%{[ data-embed-type=”image” data-embed-id=”57150bfe89121ca96b9555f2″ data-embed-element=”aside” ]}%

A couple of years ago, Wisconsin-based home-improvement store Menards looked poised to fan out across the Kansas City metro area, adding perhaps as many as six stores in short order.

The chain, which readers may recall from its annoying catchy commercial jingle (“save big money at Menards!”), has played an erratic cat-and-mouse game with local municipalities and others across Missouri since then.

At one point, a company spokesman explained its reticence to expand into the St. Louis suburb O’Fallon by telling the St. Charles County Suburban Journal that the Obama administration “was scaring the dickens out of all small businesses in the USA” and that the family-owned company didn’t want to take any chances. It offered similar explanations to local media for not pulling the trigger on various planned locations.

That might be a credible explanation if Menards were a small business, but it’s not. Forbes routinely ranks Menard Inc. among its top 100 private companies.

Menards might be taking another crack at expanding, even though Obama is still president.

Last week, the Kansas City Business Journal reported that now maybe Menards will land in Olathe, even though the company has had a hard time getting that city’s planning commission excited about the project.

But is Menards the type of corporate presence that’s wanted or needed locally?

Yesterday, Yahoo! News published a story about how Menards has been a frequent target of the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources for repeatedly violating that state’s illegal hazardous dumping laws. At one point, company owner John Menard Jr. was tagged personally with a $1.7 million fine when regulators caught him bagging up arsenic-laced waste from a store lumber yard and chucking it out on the curb with the rest of his personal garbage instead of sending it to a hazardous waste facility.

Ever since Scott Walker was elected governor of Wisconsin, suddenly the state’s environmental regulators are taking it easy on Menards.

How could that be? Did Menards suddenly clean up its act right around the same time Walker got into office? 

Yahoo! News investigative reporter Michael Isikoff posits a different explanation: Menard ended up in Walker’s good graces after the company owner directed $1.5 million through a secretive pro-Walker front organization that promised anonymity to its donors. The Wisconsin Club for Growth’s dark money largesse helped Walker fend off a recall election in 2012.

Not only are environmental regulators now off Menard’s back, but he’s now on the receiving end of $1.8 million in tax credits from an economic development corporation that Walker chairs, according to Isikoff’s report.

Walker’s handlers deny doing favors for Menard.

Menards isn’t running a squeaky-clean enterprise in Missouri, either. Missouri Department of Natural Resources records show that its location in Poplar Bluff, Missouri, was cited by regulators last year for water pollution control problems.

The closest Menards location is in St. Joseph.