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Shopping Centers Today -> March 2001
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SYRACUSE CENTER MAY TOP MOA
By Dave Bodamer
The Syracuse, N.Y., county government has voted 14-10 to approve a property tax deal that will enable locally based Pyramid CosS. to undertake a $900 million expansion that would at least triple the size of the 1.5 million-square-foot Carousel Center. If completed, the expansion would make Carousel the largest mall in the United tates.
As a term of the January agreement, the Onondaga County Legislature said it will waive property taxes on the existing mall for 30 years in exchange for Pyramid spending $250 million to build a parking garage and road improvements that will be necessitated by the expansion. Carousel Center would grow to between 4.5 million square feet and 5 million square feet, surpassing Simon Property Group’s Mall of America, which has a total area of 4.2 million square feet. The Mall of America has itself proposed an expansion to add 5 million square feet (which would bring it back to the status of biggest mall in the country), but those plans have not yet gained approval from local governments.
The tax deal obligates Pyramid to build only the first phase of the expansion, adding 800,000 square feet, but Pyramid CEO Robert Congel and Carousel Center Director of Leasing Steven Congel both stressed that the full expansion will be completed.
"We are going to finish every stage of it; there is no dou”bt in my mind,” Robert Congel said in a statement. "Keep in mind that this is where I live. I made a commitment to this community.”
Clearance from Onondaga County was the last approval hurdle that the Carousel Center faced. Syracuse’s City Council had previously approved the project.
"We’re now officially in the lease-design-construction phase,” Steven Congel said. "We’re go go go on this.
" Pyramid has not devised the full expansion schedule yet. Phase I will consist of adding between 800,000 square feet and 1 million square feet. Steven Congel gave an optimistic estimate of early fall as the start of construction on that phase. The rest of the expansion is a bit unclear at this point, he said. There will be two other phases that will add another 2 million to 2.5 million square feet to the project. However, Pyramid has not yet figured out what the scopes of Phase II and Phase III will be yet, nor has it targeted dates for construction. Overall, the expansion, if the most optimistic plans are realized, will add 3.5 million square feet to the center, giving it a total area of 5 million square feet, about 500,000 square feet larger than what Pyramid had originally slated when it first announced expansion plans in 2000.
"Our intention is to complete the entire project. The terms of the [tax deal] does only obligate us to complete Phase I, but we have every intention to do the entire project. I think that the city and county have faith that Pyramid will compel the whole project,” Steven Congel said.
The planned expansion includes four hotels, a four-level aquarium, hockey rinks, indoor soccer fields and an indoor water park as well as shops and restaurants.
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