By Gina Long
I recently had the misfortune of visiting a few stores at the Uptown Mall.
The trip required keen eyesight, tiger-like reflexes and the ability to shake off lower back pain from the sudden and hard jarring.
The city recently approved a 2% CID (Community Improvement District) sales tax surcharge, doubling the 1% previously assessed on area businesses. The concept is that the city collects additional sales tax in that area, then the extra tax is returned to the property owner for reinvestment, generally for upkeep. More sales should translate into more revenue for the mall’s owners to keep up with at least basic maintenance.
The Uptown Mall’s owner, RockStep Capital, purchased the property in 2014 and was approved for a 1% CID, badly needed to repair the roof, plumbing, and other structural problems.
None of those funds appear to be invested in fixing the driveways and parking lot.
Occasionally, a battered pickup truck pulls up to a 3-foot crater, and a few men in orange vests and hard hats spill out with a couple of small bags of cold asphalt patch material and two or three shovels. They dump the bags, tap with the shovels and move on. I rarely see them fixing more than two or three holes, usually on the street between Bomgaard’s and Walmart.
A week later, the patch mysteriously disappears.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
The amount of tire damage, the number of bent rims, and the uncounted damage to vehicle suspension systems remains untallied. I avoided the mall when we had snowfall because I could not see the craters. Those potholes multiplied and expanded with the winter’s melt/refreeze cycle. This week, I watched someone in a compact car nearly lose control when encountering a giant pothole in front of TJ Maxx.
If the mall’s owners do not want to fix the problem permanently, they could mitigate it by tearing up the little-used parking areas and converting them to green spaces. Planting trees and grass has the additional benefit of combating the large heat dome created by uncovered asphalt absorbing and re-radiating solar heat.
The mall has worked to bring in new stores, finally making progress after losing nationwide mall-based retailers that imploded in 2015 and 2016. However, drawing attention to a vast, empty and crumbling parking lot isn’t appealing to potential tenants.
As a shopper, I am reluctant to spend my consumer dollars where I am paying a higher sales tax and possibly incurring a preventable vehicle repair.
I ask the City of Hutchinson to add a guarantee that the parking lot will be fixed and adequately maintained as a stipulation in the 2% CID agreement.
