While the St. Paul Shopping Mall is sporting new tenants and will soon be back at 100 per cent occupancy, the parking lot has been posing some headaches for customers, with new speed bumps scraping the underside of drivers’ cars.
A question posed on the St. Paul Journal Facebook site about the speed bumps got readers venting.
“I’m all for speed bumps to keep the speed down but my car is so low that I'm afraid if I drive over them I will lose my oil pan,” said Colette Gascon-Zahar, with several others commenting on cars “bottoming out” and Ellie Peters adding, “Whoever made those 'mountains' shoulda stuck with 'molehills'!”
Kim Donais, the property manager for the mall, explains the contractors hired to put in speed bumps were supposed to make them between three to four inches.
“They accidentally made them too high,” he said, adding one of the speed bumps is 4 1/2 inches, which makes a difference to small cars. The contractors were asked to come back, and Donais said they would be addressing the problem by scraping the bumps down to at least three and a half inches this week.
The speed bumps are necessary, though, he said, adding, “It’s a racetrack across there . . . We had to figure out a way to slow people down, it’s ridiculous. It’s totally for safety.”
“If people would just use common sense then we wouldn’t have to do this,” he said, adding the plan is to continue to use three speed bumps and see if those are enough to control speeding issues and make sure shoppers are safe.
Another issue the mall faces is the continued use of the parking lot by large trucks. Since 2009, or roughly when Tim Hortons opened, about a million dollars in damages have been done to the lot, for which repairs are slowly being done to address.
“The parking lot got totally chewed up by big trucks,” said Donais.
Big blocks had been used to stop people from driving semis in the parking lot, but other drivers had complained about them being in the way and hitting them. Instead, the mall has moved to using islands, which are also problematic since they slow snow removal down, and people with big trucks continue to drive over them, said Donais.
“If we see them, we report them to their companies,” he said of semis using the lot. “The parking lots aren’t designed for that.”
The store has also fielded complaints about the closure of an alley north of the mall between Super 8 and Boston Pizza, to facilitate the opening of Peavey Mart and its adjacent yard. The access was paved, but was again not meant for big trucks to drive through, said Donais.
“It was never a street, it was always private property,” he explained, adding that big trucks again wielded damage on the route. “It kind of busted up the asphalt as well.”
While changes to the parking lot and speed bumps may have irked some people, Donais emphasized the mall has gone through an evolution and moved from being “virtually empty since 2008” to now boasting newly opened stores Peavey Mart and Mark’s Work Wearhouse, alongside the Dollar Tree and Giant Tiger. Ardene, billed as a “Girls’ clothing, footwear and accessories” store, is slated to open its doors in the mall in early December.
“Obviously the good news story is the mall is 100 per cent full,” he said, adding the managers are glad to put the days of the mall’s near vacancy behind them.
