Area residents have various reactions to Spotsylvania supervisors' 'no' to incentives for Spotsylvania Mall expansion, renovation

By CATHY JETT
and GEORGE WHITEHURST

Date published: 3/11/2005

Plan's rejection faulted, praised

Brian and Amber Feiffer remember when Spotsylvania Mall was new and the place to shop in the Fredericksburg area.

Now, the Spotsylvania County couple goes to the mall only to shop at Costco for things for their family and their new house on Smith Station Road. They do much of their other shopping in Central Park.

"If they renovated it, yeah, we'd come back," Brian Feiffer told a reporter yesterday as the family headed into the warehouse club to buy a swing set for their three young daughters. "I think a lot of people would feel that way. There's not a lot to keep you at the mall right now."

That sentiment is why many people were surprised by the Spotsylvania Board of Supervisors' decision early Wednesday to reject a $17 million economic incentives package for mall owner Cafaro Co. to renovate and expand the 25-year-old shopping destination. The Youngstown, Ohio, company also would have built a four-lane road connecting the mall to Harrison Road, along with other road improvements.

Nearly 80 percent of the 153 people who responded to an online poll at fredericksburg.com, an online affiliate of The Free Lance-Star, said the board blew a big opportunity to improve the mall and get a much-needed road in the process. Several poll voters said supervisors had been too hasty in their decision, and should have sought more public input before acting.

(Click here to view results of the poll and to cast your own vote.)

"I wonder what would have happened if the developer was Cosner, Vakos, Silver, or Hazel instead of Cafaro?" mused one member of the Web site's Fredericksburg Users Group.

The other 20 percent said that Cafaro Co. was asking for too many financial incentives, and it would have been a raw deal for the county.

"Yes, the mall needed updating, but I fail to understand why the county should pay for the construction to the mall instead of the company," said a FUG regular. "The traffic at [Central Park] shows the area has the traffic to support a lot of business, but the county shouldn't be building the businesses for them."

Date published: 3/11/2005