Wal-Mart’s enormous distribution center officially opened for business Wednesday.

It’s huge news, and the Sun Journal has tried to treat it that way.

The project, which Wal-Mart says will eventually employ 450 full-time workers with a beginning wage of $13 per hour with benefits, required a large public investment to become a reality. Kept hush-hush by city councilors terrified of offending the world’s largest corporation, the city agreed to a $17 million package of tax breaks and incentives to lure the facility to Lewiston.

Wal-Mart’s relationship with the media and many of the communities in which it tries to locate can best be described as strained. The company, which at least one scholarly report credits with single-handily increasing U.S. productivity, is often criticized for the low wages and benefits it offers its hourly retail employees. It’s blamed for forcing smaller competitors to close and for retarding wage growth, especially in rural and poor areas.

Someone unfamiliar with the company’s media strategy might assume that it would be eager to trumpet the parts of its business that create better paying jobs and include a full range of benefits. They’d be wrong.

The Arkansas-based Wal-Mart limited access to the local facility managers and tightly controlled what they were allowed to talk about. It has closed access to the distribution center and the people who work there despite offering state and local political elites – including Gov. Baldacci – a tour. A spokesman says that the company prefers to keep media focus on its retail stores. Why, exactly, given the criticism it often faces, we’re not sure.

When it came time for Wal-Mart to decide where to build its facility, public funds played a substantial role. When it came time to unveil the effort, the public was not nearly as welcome.

In Pensacola, Fla., a local columnist for the New Journal wrote a piece critical of the company.

“I like Wal-Mart prices the same as the next shopper, but there’s a downside, too. Many Wal-Mart employees lack the fringe benefits and insurance that make the difference between existence and a good quality of life. Yet, we customers pay a surcharge from a different pocket – subsidizing health care for Wal-Mart employees who can’t afford it,” Mark O’Brien wrote. Wal-Mart employees who can’t afford insurance rely on the Medicaid.

Wal-Mart responded by having the newspaper banned from the store. As the newspaper’s publisher wrote in a follow-up column, “The store ordered us off their property, told us to come pick up our newspaper racks and clear out. So we did.”

Eventually, the bigwigs in Bentonville, Ark., reversed the decision, and allowed the newspaper back in. But the point was still made: Don’t mess with Wal-Mart.

For this area, the Wal-Mart distribution center represents a major economic development story. If the company honors its commitments to Lewiston, it will invest more than $60 million here; more than $30 million has been spent to date. Already, the company has started paying property taxes into the city’s coffers and expects to hire at least 200 more people in 2006.

We’d like to tell readers more about it, to provide a glimpse at the other side of a company that’s often vilified. We’re interested because we think readers are. Wal-Mart isn’t.