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Norfolk — Could one of the anchors of MacArthur Center mall become a one-stop shop for city services?
Norfolk is exploring the idea of consolidating several city offices that are currently in rented private space into the former Nordstrom building.
The city owns the 130,000-square-foot space — part of an effort to draw the retailer here in the 1990s to reinvigorate downtown Norfolk — and Nordstrom moved out last year as its lease ended. The cavernous three-story department store has sat empty for the past 18 months, and other private tenants haven’t been interested.
Jared Chalk, Norfolk’s economic development director, said ongoing uncertainty about MacArthur Center and owner Starwood Property Trust has been a huge hurdle.
At the end of last year, it was revealed that the company had defaulted on a $750 million loan that used MacArthur Center and three other malls as collateral.
“We have had retailers look at it, we’ve had developers look at it. The biggest concern is what’s the future of the mall,” Chalk said Wednesday.
The idea of using the space at Nordstrom for city purposes has been tossed out occasionally during council discussions. Now, the city wants to take a serious look.
The City Council gave staff the green light to seek firms to help Norfolk figure out what’s possible in a renovated department store space.
Right now, the plan is to get those conversations started, then potentially issue a formal request for renovation proposals sometime early next year.
The city owns more than 130 buildings with over 6 million square feet of space, Chief Deputy City Manager Wynter Benda told the council Tuesday.
Four major departments — Economic Development, IT, Utilities and Neighborhood Development — rent significant space in private buildings around downtown.
That’s costing Norfolk.
Between those four departments, the city leases 75,334 square feet at a cost of $712,563 each year.
City IT and the Utilities Department are both living on borrowed time in the Granby Municipal Building, which was sold last year to a company for conversion into private work space. Those leases run through 2023.
Leases in downtown office buildings for the city’s Neighboorhood Development and Economic Development offices also expire in the next few years.
The former Nordstrom building is more than big enough to consolidate those four city departments currently leasing private space.
Benda said they expected that it would cost around $14.85 million to renovate Nordstrom, as opposed to the $20.2 million that a private firm had said it would take to put up a planned 50,000-square-foot municipal building at the corner of Brambleton Avenue and Church Street.
“In these budgetary times, we’ve got to at least explore it," City Manager Chip Filer said in an interview Wednesday.
[ Previous coverage: Norfolk plans a $20 million building to help spur St. Paul’s redevelopment ]
That $20 million city utilities headquarters was heralded last year as a way to spur development in and around the city’s nascent St. Paul’s redevelopment effort.
But now, Filer says they don’t think that a city building would do a whole lot to spark development.
“It was adding another building to our already extensive list of buildings that we own," Filer said Wednesday. “I think we have better ideas for catalytic buildings to help with St. Paul’s. .... It doesn’t mean we don’t ultimately do something, but not a civic building.”
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The city and local housing authority own property on three of the four corners of the Brambleton and Church intersection that has been slated as the entryway to the reimagined St. Paul’s.
Filer said Norfolk is still trying to feel out what’s possible and what would work best for the Nordstrom space, so they haven’t fully figured out what city offices may go there.
“We have two departments for sure that have to go somewhere. They’re going to be homeless," Filer said.
The Nordstrom space could let the city make public-facing departments more accessible to residents, Benda said. Now, several city offices visited by residents are located upstairs in City Hall, which requires security check-in.
Council members seemed bullish on the idea. Noting Norfolk’s aging city hall — it was built in 1965 — Councilman Tommy Smigiel even asked whether other city offices could fit into the space that would be left over at the former Nordstrom if four agencies moved into the other half.
City staff said that was something they’d explore with consultants.
Ryan Murphy, 757-739-8582, ryan.murphy@pilotonline.com