Mall Takes Make-Over Mess and Delays in Stride

A rainy day four months into a $100-million make-over isn’t the greatest time to visit the Buenaventura Mall.

With a third of the stores vacant and the stream of shoppers ranging from a trickle to a slow drip, a recent deluge sent muddy water from a backed-up storm drain flowing down the center of the mall.

No one said that transforming this 30-year-old mall into Ventura County’s largest and most modern shopping mecca was going to be easy.

Only 20 more months to go.

“It will probably get worse before it gets better, but I don’t think we’ll suffer too much,” said Linda Ojida, manager of the Sweet Factory for the last four years. “Everyone still likes candy.”

Weaving their way among warped and uprooted parquet floor panels, sandbags, warning tape and bright yellow “Watch Your Step” signs, die-hard shoppers take it all in stride.

“We go to every mall,” said Liz Medina of Camarillo, out for a day of shopping with friend Rosa Fernandez. “We don’t discriminate.”

Once planned to be completed and opened in time for 1997’s holiday season, the mall’s ribbon-cutting ceremony is now targeted for Oct. 2, 1999. Construction has been stalled by two lawsuits filed by the city of Oxnard--one still under appeal--and a referendum attempt by citizens opposed to a complex tax-sharing deal devised to finance the project.

Two department stores will be built, along with a parking garage, a mass-transit center, a second story of smaller shops and 10 road-widening and freeway-interchange projects on the mall’s often-clogged access streets.

The second level will increase the number of stores at the mall from about 90 to more than 200, and national retailers already are lining up for leases, mall officials said.

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Land grading and installation of new utility lines for the new J.C. Penney store have been completed, and thousands of tons of steel for the construction of the department store and the mall’s second story have been purchased, officials said.

Construction of the J.C. Penney store is set to begin within two weeks, officials said.

Meanwhile, the numerous vacancies throughout the mall are misleading, mall and city officials say.

Although 33 of the mall’s shops are empty, most of those vacancies have been intentional. Mall owners allowed many of the leases to expire in order to create enough room to shift tenants around as construction takes place.

Plans are to concentrate the stores on one side of the shopping center, build a wall and demolish the vacant side to build a two-story wing.

The stores will then move into the new wing, while the first side is demolished and rebuilt.

“It is literally moving people from one side to the other,” said David Contis, chief operating officer of the Santa Monica-based Macerich Co., the mall’s owner. “It is incredibly complex.”

No one likes to see merchants suffer, but such growing pains are necessary to revive a mall that for years was allowed to languish, Contis said.

After managing the Buenaventura Mall since 1987, Macerich bought the aging midtown Ventura shopping center along with two other Southern California malls for $125 million in December 1996.

Now among the largest shopping center operators in the nation, the company saw enough potential in the mall and its affluent county to make it the latest mall it has acquired and redeveloped over a span of more than 25 years.

Times may prove difficult as the mall is rebuilt, but “good things are coming,” Contis believes, echoing the phrase plastered across decorative drywall that covers many of the mall’s vacant storefronts.

Contis likens the rebuilding to renovating an old house.

“No one likes the construction process,” he said. “Name one homeowner that renovated their house and said, ‘Yeah, it was wonderful.’ ”

Merchants say they understand the potential for what sits at the end of the construction process, and for many, that makes the construction hardships tolerable.

“It is kind of irritating, but I think once it’s done it’s going to be really worthwhile and it’s going to be something everyone wants to see,” said Ojida of the Sweet Factory.

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For the aging mall and its merchants, though, attempts to revive years of lagging sales over the last decade have been dogged by political battles, stalled negotiations and lawsuits.

The most significant hurdle came from the city of Oxnard, which has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to block Robinsons-May and Sears--the two anchor stores at Oxnard’s Esplanade Mall--from relocating to Ventura.

“What has aggravated this has been Oxnard’s lawsuits,” said Steve Chase, assistant to Ventura’s city manager, who has been the city’s point man on the mall project since its inception. “This was supposed to go into construction two years ago.”

Andy Huang knows it all too well.

The owner of Chinese Panda and Teriyaki Express in Buenaventura Mall’s food court said he has watched sales plummet as he has seen construction begin, and end, since signing his first lease in 1995.

January and February are typically slow months in the mall business, he said, and even a robust local economy couldn’t save this post-holiday season. Sales for the start of this year have dropped even below last year’s levels, he said.

In addition to storm flooding and Oxnard’s lawsuits, the departure of so many businesses--which left because of lapsed leases or sluggish sales--has kept shoppers away and hurt income, he said.

“I feel it, especially this year,” Huang said. “It’s kind of scary.”

Meanwhile, city officials are keeping close tabs on the project’s potential effect on Ventura’s $105-million annual operating budget. The mall, which generates about $1.1 million in sales tax revenue a year, is the city’s second largest sales tax producer next to the Ventura Auto Center.

How much of a hit the budget might take is unclear, but city finance officials are analyzing reams of data to give the City Council an idea. The analysis includes projections of how well J.C. Penney and Macy’s--the mall’s largest stores--will perform during construction.

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Ventura Mayor Jim Friedman said expected increases in sales tax revenues from the city’s downtown shopping district and the auto center are expected to offset any losses at the mall. He also noted that both department stores are being spared many of the problems that smaller mall merchants are facing.

“The smaller stores leaving are not going to have the detrimental impact on this overall sales tax impact story that would occur if J.C. Penney or Macy’s were leaving or having problems,” Friedman said. “I hate that anyone has to leave or go somewhere else, but unfortunately, there are some things we just don’t have control over.”