April 15, 1993

Investors in Wal-Mart Stores Inc. suffered another blow yesterday, as erosion continued in what was one of Wall Street's premier stocks for several years. In extremely heavy trading, Wal-Mart shares fell $1.75, to $27.25, on the New York Stock Exchange after the company's chief financial officer, Paul R. Carter, told analysts that if Wal-Mart posted 7 percent to 8 percent sales growth this year, it would be "a good performance."

President Clinton has asked Congress for authority to spend even more money on spy agencies, satellites and other intelligence activities in the 1994 fiscal year than it allotted for 1993, Congressional and Administration officials say. The request is hidden in classified sections of the Defense Department budget that on the whole reflects Mr. Clinton's plans for significant cuts in military spending.

Nassau County's system of government was declared unconstitutional today by a Federal judge, who described the weighted-voting system on the Board of Supervisors as a mathematical quagmire. The decision came only two weeks after the County Executive, Thomas S. Gulotta, proposed that Nassau scrap the 95-year-old Board of Supervisors and replace it with a county legislature. And it means that Nassau must now embark on the same path followed by New York City four years ago, when the United States Supreme Court ruled that the city's top legislative body, the Board of Estimate, violated the one-man one-vote principle. That board has since been replaced by an expanded and strengthened City Council.

Pratt & Whitney threatened today to close two Connecticut plants and to eliminate 2,300 additional jobs unless it receives concessions from its unions and tax breaks from the state. The threatened closings shocked Pratt employees and their communities, but Gov. Lowell P. Weicker Jr. and other state officials quickly vowed to meet the company's requests and to avoid the loss of more jobs on top of 6,700 that are already scheduled to be eliminated.

As long as there has been a Wicks Law, which is 72 years now, there have been people trying to repeal it. "It's a horror," said Henry Stern, president of Citizens Union, a nonprofit government monitoring group. He and other opponents of Wicks, which requires local governments to hire at least four separate contractors rather than one general contractor for most projects, say that it inflates construction costs on public projects across the state by $400 million a year. Despite perennial efforts to rescind the Wicks Law, it has stayed off the legislative agenda for decades, mostly because of the sophisticated lobbying and generous political contributions of its prime beneficiaries -- the state's plumbing, electrical and heating trades.