LOGAN — Over 200 comments, many of them against the proposed redevelopment for the Cache Valley Mall property, were fielded on the Cache Valley Daily.com and KVNU social media platforms the last couple of days.
An Omaha, Nebraska-based development firm has proposed replacing the mall with a large-scale mixed use of that space.
What’s being deemed the Cache Valley Marketplace calls for the demolition of Cache Valley Mall in favor of a large tenant, 342 apartments and a 156 room hotel on the site.
On KVNU’s For the People program on Monday, among those who called in to comment was former mall general manager Dewey Richardson, he managed the Cache Valley Mall from 2005 to 2017.
He said those years were a fun time.
“The thing that I was going to share today is that in 2013 I did a case study on what are the next steps for our shopping center. Everybody in our company did that for their particular shopping center. What’s ironic about this is that what they’re proposing today is similar to what I had come up with in 2013 as a case study. I’m not saying that I’m smart, I’m just saying that, that’s kind of what all the indications were, how the center was going, our strengths, weaknesses, so forth,” Richardson explained.
With that said, he says he thinks what is being proposed is a great idea, but what he’s worried about is that their plans are not quite inventive enough.
And he agrees somewhat with some of the suggestions from the feedback received, to incorporate recreation into the site. Richardson said when he did his research at the time, that was indicated in the trends.
“Yes, and it was kind of at the beginning stages of that, one of the biggest things that I was promoting was an indoor soccer practice facility of some sort. Because at that time, the growth rate of soccer was so huge, but where do you play soccer in Logan in the winter?”
Richardson said while he was there, one of the challenges for businesses in the mall was the local shopping patterns.
“In the national retail scheme, your second-best shopping day is Sunday, and in Logan, in Utah it’s hard, but in Logan specifically, the culture here is not to shop on Sunday, it’s all about family. So, you really had a barrier (to) entry of the national tenants because of Sunday sales being so low, and because we had to stay open, because we had department stores that dictated our hours, we had a barrier to entry to the local retailers that said they had to open on Sunday.”
He said he hopes the retailers they bring in will see the benefits of both, some that don’t have to be open on Sunday, and some that would be open.
That’s why an outdoor, open shopping area, as seen in some areas, would make better sense.