Hark, the Sound of Money

Jingle bells, shmingle bells. It’s the merry jingle of cash registers that has Ventura city officials celebrating their renovated, expanded and remonickered Pacific View Ventura Mall.

Just in time for this weekend’s kickoff of the holiday shopping season, the $100-million, 1.1-million-square-foot mall is open for business.

Ventura expects its sales tax revenue from the shopping center to jump from $800,000 this year to more than double that in the future. Much of that money will funnel right back to the mall. As part of the deal to revive the long-neglected Buenaventura Mall, city officials agreed to let the mall pay $12.6 million upfront for public improvements and have the city pay back $32.3 million over 20 years through the increased tax revenue.

It was a gamble, but one worth taking to make the most of the city’s largest source of sales tax revenue.

One place that won’t be celebrating the mall’s completion this weekend is Oxnard City Hall. That city fought a decade’s worth of costly lawsuits with Ventura in a tug-of-war over the anchor stores Sears and Robinsons-May, which ultimately abandoned Oxnard’s Esplanade Mall to join Macy’s and JC Penney across the river.

The two cities finally agreed to bury the legal hatchet--but the departure of those two department stores from the Esplanade stands to cost Oxnard about $700,000 of sales tax revenue a year.

To avoid such cutthroat competition between neighbor cities over sales-tax gold mines such as malls, outlet centers and auto rows, Sacramento must change the tax structure or local officials must negotiate cooperative agreements in which both sides win.