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."
FUG member Scott Boyer of Fredericksburg added that he hoped the vote "was a ham-fisted attempt to get a better bargaining position and that Cafaro will not walk away from the table entirely (although I feel it would be understandable and even logical for them to do so)."
Allison Mooney, who manages the Express Men store at the mall, said she still hopes the board will work out a deal, and Cafaro will follow through on plans to spruce up the mall and add an open-air shopping center, hotel, grocery store, restaurants and an 18-screen movie theater.
"We're not down about it yet," she said yesterday while talking with some employees in front of the speciality clothing store. "It's not over."
Board Chairman Bob Hagan, perhaps the strongest booster of the resolution, suggested yesterday that some sort of revised deal may be possible between the county and Cafaro.
"Everybody is still talking to each other," he said. "We have a lot of creative people on the Board of Supervisors, county staff and at the Cafaro Co. I have both hope and expectation that we will be able to move forward in some fashion."
A new deal would be good news for some mall employees who were angered by the board's rejection of the resolution.
Michele Stacy-Wenner has a long history with the mall.
"I've lived here all my life," she said. "I saw the mall go up. I worked here when I was 16. I've seen it decline."
She complained that the Board of Supervisors doesn't have a sufficiently pro-business outlook.
"They want the money and they want the business, but they don't want to do anything to make it happen. It's very frustrating," she said.
Lack of support for mall expansion will eventually kill Spotsylvania's largest revenue source, Stacy-Wenner suggested. "It's going to the point where this mall is going to close its doors, and none of us are going to have a job," she said.
"Don't you have to have a customer to have a business? What would happen if the mall closed its doors? Where would they get their tax money from?" Stacy-Wenner asked.
Rosa Lee Meade, a hairdresser at JCPenney, said the mall is at a competitive disadvantage.
"We need the new mall entrance. We need the mall updated," she said. "The mall is dying, and Central Park is getting all the business."
Her husband, Lloyd, a sales manager at the Haverty's furniture store in front of the mall, said a mall expansion would benefit all of the surrounding businesses. He also said supervisors need to lead the way, even if it means sharing tax dollars with the private sector.
"We need to spend some money to make some money, and that mall has been a big producer of money for the county," Lloyd Meade said. "We've got to update [the mall] to be competitive. If we don't, the county's going to lose money. Many businesses will leave and go someplace else."
To reach CATHY JETT: 540/374-5407 cjett@freelancestar.com