Sears to Relocate Oxnard Store to Ventura : Shopping: Company is the second retailing anchor to announce plans to leave The Esplanade for rival Buenaventura Mall.

Forsaking Oxnard for a new store across the Santa Clara River, Sears executives announced late Thursday that they would close their outlet at The Esplanade mall and move to a rival shopping complex in Ventura.

The decision follows a May announcement by Robinsons-May--The Esplanade’s other major anchor store--that it would vacate Oxnard. Both are moving to an expanded Buenaventura Mall.

Merchants doing business at The Esplanade decried the move and expressed fear that the shopping complex would no longer lure a sizable base of customers.

But Ventura city officials and developers of the Buenaventura Mall hailed the Sears announcement as another step in the city’s ongoing renewal.

“All right!” Councilman Jack Tingstrom said when told about the announcement. “That’s terrific.

“It will make it a four-anchor, class-one, regional shopping center,” he said of the Buenaventura Mall. “It fills out what we’d hoped would happen. We were hoping for four anchors and now we have them.”

David A. Jones, an executive with the company planning the Buenaventura Mall expansion, said the Sears move would complement his center and provide local residents the best shopping around when it is completed in late 1997.

“What it does is identify this as the dominant, four-anchor regional mall in west Ventura County,” he said Thursday. J.C. Penney and The Broadway are the other two anchor stores.

Sears officials said they would occupy a three-level, 184,000-square-foot store and detached auto center at the Ventura shopping mall. The Oxnard Sears store will remain open until the Ventura building is constructed.

A spokeswoman for the company handling the Buenaventura Mall expansion said Sears managers informed their employees at a storewide meeting on Thursday.

Owners of the Buenaventura Mall in May agreed to spend $50 million to expand the shopping center to two levels and four anchor stores--almost double the size of the current facility.

In exchange, the Ventura City Council agreed to rebate almost $20 million in future sales taxes and waive or delay another $5 million in city fees. At the same special meeting, Robinsons-May said it would relocate to Ventura when the expansion was completed sometime in late 1997.

Within weeks, lawyers for The Esplanade requested that the City Council rescind the agreement it signed with the Buenaventura Mall owners, claiming that council members illegally negotiated the deal behind closed doors.

Attorney Mark L. Armstrong, who wrote the letter to Deputy Mayor Gary Tuttle, could not be reached for comment late Thursday.

Sears’ relocation is significant because it owns the company that manages The Esplanade.

At least one Oxnard city official does not believe that the move is imminent.

“Any time a major company leaves the city there will be an impact, but I’m not convinced the Ventura mall is going to go,” Councilman Bedford Pinkard said. “It looks like they’re up in the air as to whether they’ll complete all the negotiations.”

But Pinkard said the relocation could hurt Oxnard.

“It’ll put a burden on Oxnard to make sure we get another store and refurbish The Esplanade,” he said. “It’s time for the mall owners to put it in high gear.”

Merchants doing business at The Esplanade said they fear that with both anchor stores leaving Oxnard, they may be forced to relocate themselves.

“I’m very concerned about what’s going to happen to the mall,” said Benny Del Rio, a manager at the Jeans West clothing store. “There will a lot less customers coming through the mall.

“If Sears plans to move, I think it’s going to drop dead,” Del Rio said.

Jewelry store manager Christine Eykjian said the move would erode the customer base she has worked four years to build up.

“That would be pretty much of a downfall for us,” she said. “I think we’ll become like the Centerpoint Mall.”

But she added, “I’m not worried for my job. We have a lot of stores.”

At Yolie’s Mexican restaurant at The Esplanade, assistant manager Kim Garnica said the relocation may turn out for the best.

“Sears has been slowly dying out for the last couple years anyway,” she said. “Hopefully some bigger corporation will move in and it won’t hurt us.”