Buenaventura Mall

Minor league baseball, libraries and schools top a heavyweight agenda for Ventura city leaders, who hope to see dramatic changes in 1997. And the city will be hard at work implementing a number of ambitious projects approved in 1996. Jackhammers, shovels and backhoes will be tearing up ground to start work on the $50-million Buenaventura Mall expansion, the 10-screen downtown theater and the adjacent downtown parking structure.

A subsidiary of shopping center giant Macerich Co. has purchased Buenaventura Mall and is now poised to move forward with its long-awaited $50-million expansion. Buenaventura Mall and two other shopping areas in Fresno and Huntington Beach were acquired at midnight Wednesday for a combined sale price of $125 million. An exact price for Buenaventura Mall was not announced.

A gun-wielding mugger stole $725 from a 27-year-old Ventura man near the Buenaventura Mall, police said Saturday. John Cesario required treatment for a minor head wound at Community Memorial Hospital Friday afternoon after the robber struck him over the head with a revolver, authorities said. The incident occurred at South Mills Road and Preble Avenue as Cesario was getting out of his car near a market, police said.

The November ballot will likely include a referendum asking the voters to decide if the city of Ventura should move forward with expansion plans for the Buenaventura Mall. I would like to offer three challenges. First, the Oxnard City Council should cancel its lawsuits against the city of Ventura and instead use a portion of those dollars to hire a consultant to find what the ideal stores are for Oxnard's Esplanade. It is likely the introduction of the outlet malls and Wal-Mart had a greater impact on a decrease in sales in The Esplanade than any action taken by Ventura.

The city must count signatures signed in support of a referendum targeting the Buenaventura Mall expansion, even though many of the names were collected improperly, a Superior Court judge ruled Monday. Judge William L. Peck reluctantly sided with a political committee bankrolled by the owners of a rival mall that sued the city in April for throwing out nearly one-fifth of the signatures favoring a referendum.

Discouraged by lackluster sales and a flurry of lawsuits that have halted expansion plans, a growing number of businesses are now vacating the aging Buenaventura Mall. Three stores moved out in April. Two other shops plan to shut down at the end of the month, and business owners say other stores are close to walking away as a result of a bitter sales tax war between Oxnard and Ventura.

The city won Round 1, but the fight over the planned expansion of Buenaventura Mall is not over yet. The anti-mall initiative, Measure S, was shot down by nearly two-thirds of the city's voters. Now, supporters and opponents are gearing up for their next battle: a referendum aimed at overturning the City Council's approval of the $50-million project and its much-debated financing plan. "We are not out of the woods yet," Councilwoman Rosa Lee Measures said Wednesday.

A Ventura County Superior Court judge on Thursday indicated that Oxnard's lawsuit against Ventura over the proposed Buenaventura Mall expansion should be heard by an outside judge. Although Judge John J. Hunter has not issued his formal ruling on Oxnard's request to move the trial to a neutral location, he said Thursday that he is inclined to agree with that city's attorneys.

As co-chair of the Citizens Against the Sales Tax Giveaway, I would like to respond to the challenge put forth by the Dunning Street Neighbors Assn. (DSNA) in its March 10 letter regarding the expansion of the Buenaventura Mall. DSNA claims that the deal to give $32 million of city sales tax to the Chicago-based developers of the mall is a "good deal." This is the same deal that prevents the city from seeing any of the new sales tax generated by developers for the next 20 years. This is the same deal that gives the developers $20 million so they can build a privately owned and operated garage that only benefits the mall.

Oh, boy, did I get a message from that Feb. 18 article ("Measure Highlights Cities' Hunger for Sales Tax Dollars") on cities and what they do to get shopping centers. We watched the city of Oxnard "give it away" to Wal-Mart, Price Club, the Oxnard Outlet Mall, ad nauseam, while more and more locally owned businesses just lost heart and closed. We are currently watching the city of Ventura attempt to "give it away" to the Buenaventura Mall while most of the locally owned "little guys" on Main Street and elsewhere just fade away.