Oxnard to Sue Ventura Over Mall Expansion

Stepping up efforts to block a planned expansion of the Buenaventura Mall, Oxnard’s City Council decided Tuesday to sue Ventura over the $50-million project.

The long-anticipated move is a last-ditch effort by Oxnard to save The Esplanade shopping center and preserve a precious revenue source for the city.

Both of The Esplanade’s two anchor tenants--Sears and Robinsons-May--have announced plans to relocate to an expanded Ventura mall, a move that would result in an estimated loss of more than $500,000 in sales taxes to Oxnard each year.

Oxnard City Atty. Gary Gillig said the lawsuit, which will be filed today in Ventura County Superior Court, will attack Ventura’s expansion plan on the grounds that the environmental review it commissioned on the project has major flaws.

Specifically, Gillig said, the environmental study downplayed the proposed project’s effect on traffic and air quality and failed to consider the economic damage to Oxnard if Sears and Robinsons-May leave The Esplanade.

Gillig said Oxnard will seek an injunction to halt the mall expansion.

The injunction “is available and we are asking for the project to be stopped,” Gillig said after council members agreed in a closed session to take legal action. “We are also asking the city of Ventura to correct the defects in the [environmental impact report].”

News of the suit came as no surprise to Ventura officials.

“It is obvious that this is their desperate, last-ditch effort,” said Ventura City Councilman Jim Friedman. “Sears and Robinsons-May made it very clear they want to leave The Esplanade. It is just another delay. Unfortunately, with these types of projects, delay, delay, delay is the name of the game.”

Ventura officials say the lawsuit is groundless, adding that there is no merit to Oxnard’s contention that it was not notified of hearings on the project, in violation of the state’s open meeting law.

“We believe the [environmental impact report] was correctly formatted and the information needed to make the decision regarding the mall . . . was in the report,” Ventura City Atty. Peter Bulens said. “Environmental impact reports aren’t supposed to take into account economic hardships. Those are not environmental concerns.”

Gillig estimates that Oxnard has spent more than $50,000 on the case so far and said litigation could cost more than $150,000. He said the city plans to recoup attorneys’ fees if it wins the legal action.

When the mall expansion plan began to solidify and the departure of the two anchor stores from Oxnard became a possibility, Oxnard officials started to lobby Ventura more heavily about joining forces to build a regional mall.

Under that concept, the two cities would have split sales tax revenues from a regional shopping center that would have been built at a central location.

Before Tuesday’s vote, Oxnard officials renewed their appeal for an effort to study the potential for a shared-tax revenue plan, but Ventura leaders said the proposal was too late and self-serving.

“Now because their shopping center has deteriorated and now because Robinsons-May and Sears want to come to us, they want to share,” Ventura Mayor Jack Tingstrom said. “I haven’t seen any movement from them wanting to share Wal-Mart and all of those” stores along the Ventura Freeway.

Oxnard’s decision to pursue litigation came two days before a Thursday deadline to file lawsuits contesting Ventura’s plans to proceed with the mall project. And Oxnard’s suit represents the newest of several obstacles Ventura must clear for the expansion to go forward.

Voters will go to the polls March 26 to decide on a measure--funded almost entirely by owners of The Esplanade--that seeks to block the project by prohibiting sales tax rebates to developers.

Measure supporters object to a $12.6-million tax rebate promised to mall developers MCA Buenaventura Associates. Over 20 years, the payback, including interest, is expected to reach $32.3 million.

Oxnard City Councilman Andres Herrera said Tuesday that such a deal would be bad for both cities.

“If Ventura was bringing in two new major anchors, that would be great,” Herrera said. “But they are not. They are just moving them 3 1/2 miles down the road. They are not going to get the benefit of what we are losing. That is the irony of the situation.”

Ventura officials have said the payback arrangement is not a losing deal because the city is guaranteed its current annual $1.1 million in sales taxes from the mall.

Herrera said the current lawsuit mirrors a situation in 1986 when Ventura sued Oxnard to stop the Oxnard Town Center from being built along the Ventura Freeway at the Santa Clara River Bridge.

At the time, Ventura claimed the project would create massive traffic problems. The two cities reached a settlement, keeping Oxnard from breaking ground on the center until the bridge is widened. That work is expected to start by the end of the millennium.

Herrera said Ventura’s expanded mall could clog the Ventura Freeway with traffic and create other problems, claims put forward by Ventura officials a decade ago when the Oxnard Town Center was being proposed.

“Those issues are as relevant today as they were then,” he said.

But Steve Chase, assistant to Ventura’s city manager, said the Oxnard Town Center as proposed in the mid-1980s was a much larger project that would have drawn 92,000 additional cars a day, compared to 8,200 more a day that the expanded mall is expected to generate.

Ventura Mayor Jack Tingstrom said that he was disappointed by Oxnard’s move but that it would not sour relations between the neighboring cities.

“I am sorry that it has come to this,” Tingstrom said. “But I am going to continue to work with our friends over there. This is just something that they figure they have to go through with.”