Cedar Rapids projects manager's firm seeks to buy Westdale Mall

John Frew - the venue developer whom City Hall hand-picked to manage its high-profile, $125-million-plus Convention Complex and hotel projects - is leading a group of investors in an attempt to purchase and redevelop the long-troubled, half-empty, 32-year-old Westdale Mall.

Frew on Friday said his firm, Willow Creek Ventures LLC , has signed a purchase contract with the mall's two owners, Tremont Capital Corp., Oak Park, Ill., which owns most of the mall, and City Gate LP, Arcadia, Calif., which owns the anchor space that once housed the Wards store before it left the mall in 2001.

Willow Creek is in a period of “due diligence” before it decides if it will close on the entire 72-acre property by mid-to-late summer, he said.

“We're the only ones under contract; it's an exclusive deal,” Frew said. “Our goal is to make things better for everyone. And we have to be assured we can accomplish that before we go forward.”

Frew said his investor group first made a bid to buy the mall eight months ago, but backed out because it was unable to get both pieces of the mall as part of a sale. The mall property can't be redeveloped with just part of the property, he said.

This time around, Frew characterized the current owners as more “aggressive sellers,” and he said he was able to get both to agree to sell at the same time. The price is lower now than eight months ago, he added.

Frew said his investors are looking at a couple of dozen possible plans for the mall property with the only certainty being that the mall property will change significantly if purchased by Willow Creek.

“It has struggled as you know for a long time as a mall,” he said. “And I don't think there is any future for it as a mall as it currently exists. And that's the exciting part.”

Frew said dozens and dozens of malls around the nation have “withered and died,” but he said others have been “repositioned” and now flourish in a new and different form. He pointed to the successful The Streets at SouthGlenn in the Denver, Colo., metropolitan area, which once was Southglenn Mall similar in size and look to Westdale Mall.

In that instance, the new owners demolished everything except for two anchor stores and then rebuilt an entire village around them, he said.

“We have a team of people working on this every day, working hard on design, on layout, on what you keep and what goes away,” he said of the possibilities for the Westdale Mall property. “… So it's an exciting prospect. And it's in an area of town that has a great future.”

Frew said it is a change that would have happened some years ago if the mall's two owners would have agreed to sell at the same time at the right price.

“The circumstances were just right,” he said of Willow Creek's ability to put the two pieces together. He said he's had his eye on the property for some time and “paid attention where others maybe didn't.”

Frew said Willow Creek wants the current mall's two anchor tenants, J.C. Penney and Younkers, to remain, saying “we see them as a big part of the future.”

He pointed to the distressed Southridge Mall in Des Moines, which is undergoing a transformation, noting that J.C. Penney decided to stay there while Younkers did not.

Frew's name has been mentioned in relation to Westdale Mall by local elected officials in recent months as have the names of other possible local investors.

Then this week, Frew's interest in the mall surfaced publicly when the City Assessor's Office reported on a list of owners and representatives of high-valued properties who are appealing the valuations of their properties to the Cedar Rapids Board of Review. The assessor's list associated Willow Creek Ventures LLC with the Westdale Mall appeals, and a routine check identified Frew as a founding principal of Willow Creek Ventures.

Frew on Friday said he, as “pending” owner of the Westdale Mall properties, has been authorized by the current owners to challenge the valuation placed on eight parcels that comprise Westdale Mall by City Assessor Scott Labus.

The City Assessor's Office has valued the properties $19.4 million, while Frew has argued that the parcels are worth just $10.3 million.

Frew said the owner of the property, whether it is his firm or someone else, would benefit from the lower valuation, which will mean a smaller property-tax burden.

In fact, the valuation of the Westdale Mall property has been dropping via valuation appeals for years. Anchor tenant Wards left the mall in 2001 and anchor Von Maur followed in February 2007.

In 2006, the entity purchasing the largest piece of the mall was foreclosed on, and by July 2007, the lender, Park National Bank of Chicago, took possession of that piece of the mall at a sheriff's sale for what it was owed, $19 million. In October 2009, the federal government then closed down Park National Bank.

A flashback to 2007 provides a view of what a new Westdale Mall might look like.

In 2007, then-City Manager Jim Prosser and the City Council worked with outside consultants, RDG Planning and Design of Omaha and Des Moines and Economic Research Associates of Chicago, to try to imagine a new future for the mall. A concept emerged to transform the 900,000-square-foot enclosed mall into a retail center a third or half as big with storefronts facing sidewalks, streets and the parking lot. The vision also included the addition of town houses, apartments, offices, public uses, open space and amenities.

“What we're trying to do is test ideas,” Prosser said then. “We're just thinking about stuff. What it really gets back to is the market. Is there enough retail market demand for that amount of mall space?”

City Hall set aside its effort at the end of 2007 after no new buyer stepped forward and after some in the local Realtor community suggested that the mall could return to its former retail success in its current form. It didn't.

The mall has been helped along since the flood of 2008 because both Linn County and the Cedar Rapids Public Library have centered their operations there. Linn County will return to its former home on First Street SW this summer and the library will move into a new building in the summer of 2013.

On Friday, Mayor Ron Corbett said the City Council has an interest in providing local property-tax incentives to convert “distressed” properties into revitalized ones, and he pointed to the Raining Rose redevelopment at the site of the former Allis Chalmers heavy-equipment plant on First Avenue SE as one example.

“People often ask us, ‘What are you guys doing about Westdale Mall?'” Corbett said. “My guess is that the City Council would look favorably on some type of (incentive) once the property is purchased.”

Frew, an Iowa native, was a development consultant and political strategist in Denver - he ran for mayor in 1995 - before he left in 2009 to become then-Iowa Gov. Chet Culver's chief of staff. The city of Cedar Rapids hired Frew away from Culver in 2010 to oversee the city's Convention Complex project and then its hotel project. The Convention Complex, which includes renovation of the city's arena and the construction of a new convention center next to it, now is expected to cost $85 million while the hotel renovation's cost is more than $40 million.