Group Fights Opposition to Mall Project : Development: Business owners and environmentalists team up against an initiative drive targeting Buenaventura improvements.

Seeking to safeguard the expansion of the Buenaventura Mall, an unlikely coalition of business owners and environmentalists has joined forces to kill an initiative drive aimed at thwarting mall improvements.

Representatives of the Chamber of Commerce, Voters Coalition, Visitors and Convention Bureau and the city’s police and firefighters’ associations are collectively fighting a fledgling initiative proposal, which they consider a threat to the shopping center’s long-awaited expansion.

“We, like everybody else, believe that if the mall doesn’t expand it will wither away and hurt the city economically,” said Councilman Steve Bennett, the unofficial leader of Voters Coalition.

Bennett said the environmental group supports the mall expansion because it involves urban development--not development on farmland.

The anti-expansion drive is being spearheaded by Lary Reid, a Ventura businessman who opposes a tax-sharing proposal between the city and mall developer.

“It’s really just getting started,” Reid said. “It’s really a grass-roots petition drive at this point.”

Reid filed a notice of intent to circulate a petition last month. To qualify the measure for the March ballot, backers must collect signatures from 15% of the city’s 69,844 registered voters by Nov. 6, or 10,476 signatures in the next 19 days.

“It’s very tight,” City Clerk Barbara Kam said Wednesday. “But it has been done before.”

Bennett said he expects the initiative to quality. And while Reid initially seemed a voice in the wilderness, the new coalition is taking his efforts seriously.

“A lot of people in the community have said, ‘Hey, this can’t happen. We want this mall development,’ ” said Linda Sonnonstine, a spokeswoman for the mall owners, MCA Buenaventura Associates L. P. of Los Angeles.

MCA Buenaventura’s general partner is a subsidiary of LaSalle Partners in Chicago, the third-largest real estate investment advisory firm in the nation.

The mall owners plan to spend tens of million of dollars to upgrade the shopping center by adding a second level of stores, a 650-car parking structure and two new anchor stores.

Robinsons-May and Sears have agreed to leave The Esplanade shopping center in Oxnard for the renovated mall in Ventura. The new anchors would join The Broadway and JCPenney, which plans to relocate to a new building.

The mall expansion would require 22 accompanying public projects, including major road improvements in the mid-town area. The public improvements are projected to cost about $20 million.

That is where the city’s tax-sharing plan comes in.

Under a deal being brokered, mall developers would pay for the improvements and be reimbursed by the city’s share of increased sales tax revenues once the expansion is complete.

“It is a win-win situation for the city,” Bennett said. “It is a no-risk investment.”

But Reid disagrees. In his notice of intent, the furniture repairman calls the plan “a horrendous deal to give away up to $19 million of our sales tax dollars.”

The initiative seeks to prohibit the city from committing current or future sales tax revenue to developers, and from subsidizing public improvements to allow for the mall expansion.

“It is not their money, it is our money,” Reid said Wednesday. “And they want to give away $19 million or $20 million to private developers, rich developers that are not even in Ventura County.

“I just don’t feel that it is fair,” he said, “I think the priorities have run amok.”

City officials have packed their fall calender with meetings and hearings to get a formal proposal on the mall expansion to the City Council by the end of November.

Supporters of the mall expansion say the initiative drive has the potential to derail negotiations with the leading anchor store candidates and set back an intentionally tight timeline.

Robinson’s-May wants to relocate by Christmas, 1997. To do that, road improvements and mall construction must begin by the start of next year, city officials have said.

“They are trying to slow that timeline down,” Bennett said, “because delay is one way you can spook the anchors from coming.”