Ventura Urged to Drop Tax Deal for Mall

Moving to head off a potential lawsuit, Ventura’s city attorney recommended Thursday that a multimillion-dollar tax-sharing plan with the owners of the Buenaventura Mall be rescinded.

But City Atty. Peter D. Bulens said the long-planned expansion of the Buenaventura Mall is not threatened.

“This is a legal chess game,” said Bulens, who will ask the City Council on Monday to nullify the agreement in response to a June 27 letter from lawyers for The Esplanade mall in Oxnard. “This doesn’t have anything to do with whether the mall gets expanded.”

Any new agreement would almost certainly contain the same or similar tax breaks and fee waivers, Ventura Councilman Gregory L. Carson said.

In a statement issued Thursday, City Manager Donna Landeros called The Esplanade letter “an obvious attempt to try and stall or stop” the mall expansion.

“Let there be no mistake that the public planning process has begun and is moving ahead,” she said. “We are looking forward to making a good project even better.”

David A. Jones, who represents the Buenaventura Mall development company, said he has been kept informed of the city’s legal strategy since the council discussed the matter in closed session last Monday.

“This doesn’t change anything as far as our understanding with the city,” he said. “We’re moving forward with the expansion.”

Esplanade attorney Mark L. Armstrong had requested that the agreement be rescinded on the grounds that it was negotiated in private and that the tax-sharing plan may not be legal.

Ventura officials deny those allegations. Nonetheless, Armstrong was pleased with Thursday’s development. “Maybe our request was a reasonable one,” he said.

Armstrong said his clients want to make sure that the two malls compete for tenants fairly. “The best way to ensure that is to have any discussions that Buenaventura is undertaking be done in public,” he said.

Both of the Oxnard mall’s major tenants--Sears and Robinsons-May--already have agreed to move from The Esplanade to the Buenaventura Mall when the expansion is completed, threatening the viability of one of Oxnard’s larger sales-tax contributors.

In response, numerous Esplanade merchants have expressed concern that their customer base would crumble if both Robinsons-May and Sears vacate the complex.

Owners of the Buenaventura Mall plan to increase the shopping center by almost 50%, to more than 1.2 million square feet. Preliminary work is scheduled to begin later this year, and they hope to complete the expansion by the end of 1997.

Signed in May at a special meeting of the City Council, the non-binding agreement would rebate nearly $20 million in future sales taxes to developers, who agreed to invest $50 million to renovate the complex.

It also calls for the city to waive or defer an additional $5 million in fees.

City Council members said the tax-sharing deal was needed to preserve the sales-tax base within Ventura, which has slipped by about $1.5 million in recent years.

They want the Buenaventura Mall expanded as soon as possible, in part because economic analysts predict that the Ventura-Oxnard area can only support one regional shopping center.

Plans for the mall expansion will be submitted by the developer Tuesday, when they will be considered at a joint meeting of the city Planning Commission and design review committee.

“That completes the filing and you begin the community process of building a better project,” said Steve Chase, who helped negotiate the tax-sharing agreement.