Mall Expansion Plans Put on Fast Track : Shopping: Officials push for project approval to accommodate Robinsons-May’s goal of being moved in before Christmas, 1997.

After years of sluggish negotiations, Ventura city officials are speeding ahead with plans to expand the Buenaventura Mall--a $50-million project they hope to have approved by the end of November.

To meet that goal, city planners have packed the fall calendar with public meetings, starting with a Saturday walking tour of the mall and its surrounding neighborhood and culminating with public hearings in November.

“This is pretty much fast tracking,” project coordinator Steve Chase said Thursday.

The reason for the rush goes something like this: Robinsons-May, which along with Sears has agreed to leave The Esplanade shopping center in Oxnard for the renovated mall in Ventura, wants to occupy its new home by the 1997 Christmas shopping season.

J.C. Penney, which now occupies the store Robinsons-May would move into, intends to build a store nearby. But construction must begin in January for Robinsons-May to be able to move in on time, Chase said.

To make the deadline, the expansion project needs to receive city approval by this fall, Chase said. If the long-discussed plans do not move forward, the anchor stores could balk.

“If we were not going forward with the planning process, we would loose Robinsons-May and Penney’s,” Chase said. Penney’s and Broadway are the mall’s anchor stores.

To hurry the process along, city officials will present a development agreement and zoning, environmental, subdivision and design reviews to the Planning Commission early next month.

If approved, those proposals would be passed on to the City Council for public hearings and a vote in November. If the council approves the expansion, construction of J.C. Penney’s, to be built on the eastern side of the mall facing South Mills Road, and major road improvements would begin at the start of next year, Chase said.

Conceptual designs for a spruced-up mall have already been drawn. City planners and developers want to give the shopping center a major make-over by adding a tower, landscaping, windows and a decorative metal roof.

But before a jackhammer splits a single chunk of concrete, city officials want additional feedback from Ventura residents on how they would like the 1.2-million-square-foot structure to look.

Residents are encouraged to attend a 10 a.m. workshop at the mall Saturday to learn about the project and to offer their views and ideas.

“This mall is for the whole community,” said Sandy Smith, chairman of the Planning Commission. “This is an opportunity to get out there and look at the visual models . . . and have some say.”

Smith said he expects people will be pleasantly surprised by the conceptual designs, which he described as radically different from any other shopping complex in the region.

“This isn’t going to be a mission-style, red-tiled roof, big square box,” Smith said. “It is going to be quite different. It is not going to be a typical mall.”

Mall owners plan to upgrade the 30-year-old shopping center by adding a second level of shops, a 650-car parking structure and the two new anchor stores.

The mall expansion would also incorporate 22 public projects, including major road improvements, such as widening Main Street and several freeway off-ramps in the mid-town area.

Developers and city officials are still negotiating an agreement that would transfer $20 million in future sales tax to the mall’s investors during the first 20 years of the new mall.