Commissioners on the public services committee discussed using the new blight ordinance to force Cardinal Regency Mall, LLC, to clean up the defunct Regency Mall property or face a lawsuit; however, the initiative was voted down and will not go to the full commission.
District 10 Commissioner John Clarke placed the item on the agenda that would have directed the city code enforcement office to initiate blight ordinance inspections on the derelict property.
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He said his aim was to see if the recently passed ordinance has “teeth” and does what it was intended to do in terms of forcing landowners to maintain their properties.
“(Cardinal Regency Mall) have held that area of the city hostage for 20 years. Through an error, they haven’t paid the storm water fee for the past three years,” Clarke said.
According to Clarke, a portion of the building has been demolished and the parking lot ripped up so that the company can continue to pay low property taxes and avoid the storm water fee.
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“They bulldozed the parking lot and now it is just a huge mud flat and the property continues to be just one big ugly eyesore,” Clarke said.
District 6 Commissioner Ben Hasan agreed with Clarke and said the commission should also look at blighted properties on Broad Street as well as Laney-Walker Boulevard.
However, District 4 Commissioner Sammie Sias argued that if the commission singled out one property, then they were basically attempting to do the job of code enforcement by directing them to look at certain properties.
“Are we starting the right precedents by these blighted properties to be directed by the commission? Or are there agencies that should go out? Because if we do this now, then every property would need to come back through the commission. I’m concerned about that,” Sias said.
Regency Mall was hailed as the largest shopping mall in Georgia when it opened in 1978. It began to wane in the late 1980s. The building was never updated and began to look dated when compared to its competitor, Augusta Mall.
Recurring crime, both inside the building and in the parking lot, gave the mall a bad reputation and by the early 1990s, its main anchor stores Belk and J.B. White’s closed. The remaining anchor, Montgomery Ward, folded in 2001.
In 2013, the mall was gutted of all flammable material due to worries that homeless people were camping inside and lighting fires.
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Many ideas have been floated over the years as possible future uses for the property from a space for government offices to an indoor amusement park, but nothing ever materialized. Augusta Mayor Hardie Davis pushed hard to have the property become the site of the new James Brown Arena, but that effort failed.
The building has remained a shell for nearly two decades.
In 2020, the Mongomery Ward portion of the building was demolished and most of the parking lot removed.
City Administrator Odie Donald told commissioners Wednesday that Regency Mall is already on a list with around 70 other properties to due for an inspection and promised to release a quarterly report on progress.
MORE: Kicking Off the Fight to End Blight in Augusta
The effort put forth by Clarke failed on a 2-1 vote with Sias, and District 1 Commissioner Jordan Johnson cast the no votes. District 7 Commissioner Sean Frantom was not present to cast a vote.
For his part, Clarke vowed to keep putting the item on the agenda until it reaches the full commission.
“It seems that Augusta is a city that selectively enforces its ordinances,” Clarke said.
Scott Hudson is the Senior Reporter for The Augusta Press. Reach him at scott@theaugustapress.com.
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