LANCASTER COUNTY, PA - A packet of coffee, enough to make a full pot? Less than a buck and a half at Wal-Mart.

A gourmet pizza, with or without anchovies, to bring along with you? Less than $5 at Wal-Mart.

Or, for the really long meetings, a gourmet gift box of fancy chocolates and packs of Starbucks coffee: $19.97 at .... Wal-Mart.

The cost to a local government in legal and engineering fees alone for 10 years of meetings on building a Wal-Mart? $117,000, and counting.

The $117,000 is what it has cost Manor Township over the past decade for municipal meetings on plans for a Wal-Mart supercenter on South Centerville Road.

While the meetings continue each month, the site remains vacant, a sprawling field amid the traffic and housing developments in the area just west of Lancaster.

There have been so many meetings about the proposed Wal-Mart — 29 at last count — that that coffee and pizza might look appealing to some who have sat through the sessions.

“It is an enormous time commitment,” says Barry Smith, the Manor Township manager.

“Not just the impact of the dollars, which I think is fairly significant, but also the impact on the staff for time and work.”

Smith has attended most of the meetings, during which representatives from Wal-Mart, the township and a local citizens group that opposes the store often joust over very technical zoning and traffic issues.

According to township records, the estimated cost to taxpayers for the Wal-Mart application now stands at $80,000 for attorneys and nearly $37,000 for engineers, who must be present as legal and technical experts for the hearings.

That doesn’t include the estimated 430 hours of staff time that has been allocated just to Wal-Mart during the 29 hearings.

It was 10 years ago this spring that township officials heard about the possibility of a huge store, a “big-box” — the term wasn’t widely known back then — being built at the site on the east side of South Centerville Road, south of Columbia Avenue.

The first application for the store was made in November 1996.

Says Smith now, “What we want people to know is, it’s been a very long and somewhat intensive hearing for us ... it’s not something that has come and gone. It has continued to build and build and build.”

The traffic study alone fills up a single drawer of a filing cabinet, he says, pointing to a spot in his office.

“It’s been such a great volume of documentation, and to try and keep it not only organized but also user-friendly for ourselves is really difficult, because we often have to go back and research who said what, and when, during a hearing.”

The current year-and-a-half-old request from Wal-Mart is before the township’s three-member Zoning Hearing Board, whose members all serve as volunteers.

Smith says the sessions are a “huge impact in time” for the zoning board, appointed to hear cases like a request for a beauty shop in a home or for a setback for a garage.

Due to the particular demands of the Wal-Mart hearings, other cases are heard at a different meeting each month. The supercenter request has its own hearing.

Because of the pages and pages of records that have been amassed over the years, Smith notes, it seems like “you need a small pickup truck to haul some of this documentation around.”

The township staff has watched the supercenter debate draw thousands of people to meetings, most of them at Manor Middle School.

Many people who live in the Woods Edge and Wilshire Hills neighborhoods, the two closest to the proposed store, oppose the store due to concerns about traffic, lights and noise.

A citizens group, Friends Against Irresponsible Development, or FAID, led by former Lancaster County Commissioner Jim Huber, formed almost immediately to lead opposition to the store.

Some have said Wal-Mart is trying to wait out the opposition, and some say the local opponents are trying to do the same, hoping the Arkansas retail giant gets tired and goes home.

Smith says township officials’ role “is often misunderstood ... our obligation is to make sure ANY applicant complies” with the law.

“Whether it’s the best use for that site or not is determined by boards of supervisors,” who have put the laws in place, he added.

“It does not come down to a personal preference of mine.”

The hearings will resume later this month, at 7 p.m. Thursday, May 25, at Manor Middle School on Charlestown Road.

For some of the hearings, there can be six attorneys present, representing: the township; Wal-Mart; the township zoning board; FAID; the interests of residents in Woods Edge; and the interests of East Hempfield, which borders Manor Township to the north, near the proposed Wal-Mart.

The current series of meetings is part of a second request for a special zoning exception before the zoning board.

Elsewhere in Lancaster County, Wal-Mart has opened two supercenters (in East Lampeter and Ephrata townships) and a smaller-sized store in Manheim Township.

It is also planning a store in Rapho Township and rumored to be anchoring Drumore Crossings at the Buck in the southern part of the county.

Before the Manor Township plan was introduced, the retail giant proposed stores in Warwick and Mount Joy townships, which were later dropped. It also had plans for a store in West Hempfield Township, but that proposal was denied.

As he listens to the testimony, Smith says it sometimes seems like Wal-Mart representatives “want to drag this on and on for the sake of wearing us out.’’

“Then I’ll watch FAID or another group,” Smith adds, and he wonders if they may have the same thing in mind.