Mall Demolition Approved

Decision passes by narrow margin
by Tim Gurrister
Standard-Examiner Staff
January 16, 2002

Ogden - Kiss the Ogden City Mall goodbye.

It's dead, to be buried, hauled off actually, by a 4-3 vote of the City Council Tuesday night.

Demolition of the 21-year old structure will begin in 30-60 days, officials said, once salvage companies are through with it.

The council's vote, sitting as the Ogden Redevelopment agency, came after 2 1/2 hours of public comment and went basically along the same lines as a failed Dec. 11 Vote to demolish, since rescinded.

Council members Mary Hall, Fasi Filiaga and Jesse Garcia voted against demolition, as they had December 11. Outgoing councilman Bud Mitchell had voted with them, but the motion died tied, with John Wolfe absent with illness. Wolfe was to say later he would have voted for demolition.

This time around, however, the self-described "new kids," Kent Jorgensen and Mark Johnson, swung the vote, even taking the lead to make and second, respectively, the demolition motion.

"We've been elected to make good, bold, daring decisions," Jorgensen said before the vote. "I think we need to move ahead."

"We spend a lot of time in Ogden looking through the rear view mirror and continue to run into something in front of us," Johnson said. "I'd like to fix some of the bleeding.... We're in control of our own destiny for the first time on this mall site."

"The longer we wait, sitting on our thumbs, wondering and worrying, the worse it gets," Safsten said. "we've got to keep moving."

Filiaga spoke strongly against the demolition, saying, "I feel like we're riding a train going too fast that's going to crash, and we have no insurance. And we own the train."

Hall, council vice-chairman, proposed delaying the vote until April until the design team the city administration is currently assembling can put together more detail on the open air "multi-use lifestyle center" officials plan to replace the mall.

Hall said she talked to three architects who were responding to the administration's request for proposals regarding the new project and said they all seemed surprised the city was moving so quickly to raze the site. "They said 'Demolish? Before you have a plan?

Hall also said she also doubted the administration's claim that the closed mall was costing more than $10,000 a week to operate, with no revenue coming in to offset those costs - the major reason officials were pushing for demolition only a month after purchase.

she said a council evaluation put the cost at closer to $3,000 a week. She also said saving the Nordstrom building in the mall deserved a second look, since it had been valued at #4 million, even though the city had purchased the entire mall for $6 million.

In extolling the virtues of demolition, Stuart Reid, city economic development director, said for the city's $6 million investment, plus the additional $4 million budgeted for site development, "we'll get a $40- to $60-million project paid for by developers."

The administration envisions roughly 400,000 square feet - half the mall's present size - of shops, restaurants, a theater complex and a grocery store in an open air setting with 23rd Street and Kiesel running through the site again.

"It's no longer a regional mall that used to draw shoppers all the way from Idaho," Reid said. "That's when there wasn't a Newgate Mall, a Layton Hills Mall or the mall in Logan. It's clear that the market has shifted substantially."

Mayor Matthew Godfrey said he has considered the mall his no. 1 project since the day he was elected. "At that point I didn't envision demolishing it. We spent my first year in office trying to bring in that major tenant."

Godfrey said he was shocked when prospective developers courted by the city kept saying the mall had to be demolished to keep up with the changing economic times.
"That was confirmed to us over and over."