"The public" is an abstraction, and the local government is just another specific organization. Everything is people, all the way down, and it is profoundly anti-social to rationalize away hostile, destructive behavior simply because you have an emotional prejudice against people who engage in commercial business.

The reality is that the behavior you are trying to justify doesn't impact the equally abstract "corporation", it impacts the actual people whose activities that concept represents -- employees, customers, investors, etc.