Neither Side Ready to Surrender in Cities’ ‘Mall Wars’

Though the state Supreme Court declined, as expected, to hear Oxnard’s appeal in its long-running battle with Ventura over the $100-million Buenaventura Mall expansion, officials say the so-called “mall wars” are far from over.

With millions of dollars in sales tax revenues on the line, city and mall officials in Ventura and Oxnard are pondering the future of The Esplanade mall and how the court defeat may affect the massive Oxnard Town Center project, planned for a site just off the Ventura Freeway between the two cities.

“Isn’t it interesting that the lawsuit Oxnard filed against Ventura had to deal with The Esplanade, yet Oxnard’s solution all along was not to rebuild The Esplanade, but to go to the Oxnard Town Center,” said Steve Chase, Ventura’s deputy city manager and the city’s point man on the mall expansion. “The issue is, what is going to be built there?”

Determining exactly what would be built at the proposed Town Center site is likely to be some years off, officials agree. Still, in a sense, the question brings the mall battles full circle.

The initial legal salvo was fired 13 years ago, when Ventura sued Oxnard over the proposed $500-million Town Center mall, which was to be the county’s largest.

That suit was resolved when Oxnard agreed that no development would occur until the Santa Clara River bridge is widened--something the state Department of Transportation is expected to do just after the turn of the century.

But Ventura filed suit against Oxnard again in May of this year, challenging Oxnard for including the 280-acre tract in its newest redevelopment district.

Ventura’s attorneys said the legal action--the latest in a flurry of lawsuits over development that the two cities have filed against each other since 1985--was a preemptive strike to protect what they perceived as an “attack” on the Buenaventura Mall expansion.

That legal maneuvering has been rendered moot, in part, by the Supreme Court’s decision Wednesday not to review Oxnard’s case, said Amy Albano, Ventura’s assistant city attorney.

“The Supreme Court takes so few cases, it really wasn’t a surprise,” she said. “It would have been a surprise if they had taken it.”

Oxnard’s suit alleged flaws in the Buenaventura Mall’s environmental review and its financing, contending the city’s deal with the developer amounted to a gift of public funds.

But the underlying motivation for the legal action--the battle over lucrative sales tax revenues--remains.

Indeed, because Ventura had won at every legal juncture, officials on both sides had viewed Oxnard’s latest suit as, at the very least, a delaying action. Oxnard hoped it could hold onto the $720,000 in annual sales tax revenue The Esplanade generates as long as possible, Oxnard Councilman Dean Maulhardt said.

The key to the Buenaventura Mall expansion is the relocation of The Esplanade’s anchor stores--Sears and Robinsons-May--to Ventura, which will bring the Oxnard mall’s economic viability into question.

Along with the two department stores, the project will add a second floor of smaller shops and double the size of the 33-year-old midtown shopping center in Ventura. Construction began last October and is scheduled for completion by October 1999.

With the latest legal round over, attention will again switch to how best to compete for the retail dollars in western Ventura County, said Carter Hemming, regional manager for MMI Realty Services, the San Francisco-based company that manages The Esplanade.

“We hadn’t pinned our hopes on the success of that case, and for some time have been planning the repositioning of the mall,” he said. “All it really does is solidify the direction we will take and eliminate any ambiguity about what the future holds. In some respects it will allow everyone to go to work and bring an end to the energy and money that’s been spent on the continued infighting between the two cities.”

Whether such a truce will develop remains to be seen.

Also in question is just how The Esplanade will survive the increased competition from the Buenaventura Mall.

The 29-year-old Oxnard mall completed a $750,000 exterior and interior renovation project this summer, but that’s seen as merely a stopgap measure, Hemming said. A new retail strategy for The Esplanade is likely to be unveiled in four to six months, he said.

“Any redevelopment of a retail nature will likely include a significant entertainment component,” Hemming said. “We are of the opinion that the most logical place within the entire city of Oxnard--and indeed within the county of Ventura--would be to have a new, significant entertainment complex located at The Esplanade, due to its location, the ease of access and the underserved population of the city of Oxnard.”

Such a strategy, however, may be difficult to achieve.

Officials note that the market may be reaching a saturation point with the recent expansion of the movie theaters on Ventura’s Johnson Drive, a few miles to the north, from eight screens to 16. And a few miles to the south in Camarillo is the relatively new 12-screen Edwards Cinemas.

Moreover, Oxnard has prohibited building new movie screens outside of downtown through a recently enacted zoning ordinance designed to ensure a proposed downtown multiplex doesn’t face competition.

What’s more, with the Buenaventura Mall’s expansion, the sort of regional mall envisioned for the Town Center site is no longer considered feasible.

Instead, that location could become the site of a large office and entertainment complex along the lines of the Universal Citywalk or the Ontario Mills mall, said Dick Maggio, Oxnard’s community development director.

Oxnard officials have said the two cities could work in concert to develop the Town Center site, which would bring an end to the lawsuits and ensure that whatever is built is acceptable to both communities.

The venerable Wagon Wheel complex across the street is also looking to revitalize itself. The Oxnard Planning Commission on Thursday night was scheduled to consider a proposal to build an ice rink there.

With their options shrinking, the best bet for The Esplanade’s managers may be to go down-market and consider discount retailers, said land-use planning expert Bill Fulton.

“That’s probably a pretty good survival strategy for that mall,” he said. “It’s possible there’s some lower-end retail that would find The Esplanade attractive because of location and demographics.”

But Fulton believes that whatever happens in the ferociously competitive retail sector, along what he dubbed “sales tax canyon” in a recent book, the lawsuits are likely to continue to fly.

“They have no political motivation to resolve this; they only have political and financial incentives to keep it going,” he said. “The retail wars are never over in sales tax canyon.

“I think the people of the two cities are both losers,” he added. “The people of Oxnard and the people of Ventura live in the same place and they have a common destiny. Someday we will figure that out and start to work together on the things it makes sense for us to work together on. But I don’t see that happening any time soon.”