San Bernardino Staff Recommends City Masterplan Carousel Mall Site, not Developer

After a 21-month process that included a city-issued Request for Qualifications, the vetting of a dozen potential developers both local and national, and issuing a Request for Proposal to three finalists, the San Bernardino City Council is now scheduled to make a final determination at today’s regularly scheduled meeting for the redevelopment of the Carousel Mall in San Bernardino.

City staff has offered three potential options to the San Bernardino City Council; Approve one of the two developers, SCG America or Renaissance Downtown USA/ICO Real Estate Group for the project, or a third option previously undiscussed, allow the City Manager and staff to master plan the project.

In a surprise move, City Staff is recommending the City Council adopt the third option to “end the current process and direct the City Manager to master plan the Carousel Mall in conjunction with the Downtown Specific Plan process.”

The Carousel Mall redevelopment project has recently been the cause of controversy, with accusations of conflicts of interest made by some council members.  Complicating matters further the council has three new members who were sworn in just this past December, long after the process was underway.

A former city redevelopment agency project, the Carousel Mall has sat vacant for nearly a decade and been the focus of numerous development and reuse plans by the city over the last thirty years.  Like other large commercial shopping malls of the era, the facility lost major tenants like Harris, JC Penny’s, Montgomery Wards, and Woolworths over a period of a decade and never recovered.

All of the current mall, save for the Harris Building are currently owned by the city or through the successor agency for the defunct city redevelopment agency, created when the State of California dissolved redevelopment powers throughout the state in 2011.  Successor Agencies were obligated to oversee the wind down of redevelopment property and ultimately their return to the tax rolls.