BLACKSBURG -- Neither Wal-Mart nor the South Main Street revitalization project were on Tuesday night's Blacksburg Town Council agenda. But the council chambers overflowed with speakers, many of them waiting more than two hours to urge council to pass an ordinance to keep a so-called big-box store out of Blacksburg.

Blacksburg native Greg Nelson urged council to keep the kind of "ugly nastiness" he said Christiansburg's retail strip of big-box stores represented to him out of his hometown.

Nelson and others also condemned Wal-Mart for, they said, paying workers too little, blocking labor unions, discriminating against women and using "slave labor" to produce their products.

Rumors have swirled for the past week that Ohio development firm Fairmount Properties is courting Wal-Mart for a 40-acre project along South Main Street tentatively called the Boulevards at Blacksburg.

In an interview last month, Fairmount principal Adam Fishman said his company was talking to every size retailer -- including big-box retailers -- about joining the project.

But he provided no names of possible tenants for a 175,000-square-foot retail building shown on a conceptual site plan for the project.

Fishman did say that several other retailers, including Coldwater Creek clothiers and Books-A-Million, have either signed leases or letters of intent to join the project.

Speakers at Tuesday's council meeting also asked officials to move quickly to approve an ordinance proposed by Councilman Don Langrehr that would limit retail stores to 80,000 square feet.

Any larger building would require council approval, under Langrehr's ordinance. Council has fast-tracked the legislation and has scheduled public hearings in May.

It's unclear if such an ordinance would affect the Boulevards project.

Montgomery County developer Jeanne Stosser, who owns the property with businesswoman Georgia Anne Snyder-Falkinham, said in a voice-mail message Tuesday that she didn't think the ordinance would affect the Boulevards. Fairmount has a contract with Stosser and Snyder-Falkinham to buy the property when development begins.

Not all the comments Tuesday night were anti-Wal-Mart or anti-big box, however.

Montgomery County resident Gail Billingsley, who works in Blacksburg and said she loves to shop downtown, argued that marketing studies published in business textbooks show that sometimes Wal-Mart can revitalize downtown areas.

Billingsley urged council to consider writing an ordinance that would control what would happen to the site of a Wal-Mart if it came to town and then left.

Other towns have passed such ordinances to great benefit, the businesswoman-turned-nonprofit director said.