AUGUSTA CROSSING
Shopping Center To Open in Fall

New stores include Target, Lowe's

by Gary Remal, Staff Writer
Kennebec Journal & Morning Sentinel
August 24, 2007

AUGUSTA - The $40 million Augusta Crossing shopping center off Western Avenue is on schedule for a fall opening.

The 454,000-square-foot shopping center will include Lowe's, Target and six other retail outlets, including a new supermarket, said Howard Mintz, director of construction services for Massachusetts developer Packard Development.

Mintz estimated the new shopping center will open in "late October or early November," but not all the stores will necessarily open at the same time.

"To a certain extent, that will be up to the tenants," Mintz said.

Target, for instance, only opens stores on certain dates. Their new Augusta store will have to wait until March, Mintz said.

Only one 8,000-square-foot retail space, next to Target, remains unclaimed, he said.

Packard has a new supermarket tenant, to be built next to the Target store, Mintz said. But construction on that building has not yet begun and Mintz declined to identify the tenant as negotiations continue.

A spokesman for Hannaford Brothers Co. said Thursday his company is going ahead with plans to build at the site of the former Cony High School off Cony Circle and does not intend to relocate to Augusta Crossing.

The other stores in the southernmost of three "pods" include Best Buy, Staples, PetSmart and A.C. Moore, an arts-and-crafts store.

Augusta Crossing is about half the size of The Marketplace at Augusta, which has more than 900,000 square feet of space and is located about five miles north.

"There's no one grand, specific date when it will all be open to the public," Mintz said. "We're slightly ahead of schedule on the south pod, but the tenants have already scheduled when they're coming in so it won't make much difference. They should all be open within a few weeks of each other, but it is up to the tenants when to open.

"For the most part, we're on schedule," Mintz said. "There's always some items that are behind schedule and some items that are ahead of schedule."

Construction of the shopping plaza has required dramatic re-sculpting of the landscape, blasting tons of rock in some spots and building high retaining walls elsewhere to mitigate the sharp differences in elevation at the site.

Mintz said one of the most difficult construction problems has been rock crumbling beneath the ground where planners had expected solid ledge.

Rather than blasts creating sheer rock faces, work crews had to grind through the crumbling stone, then build more large retaining walls than originally had been foreseen.

"I can see what's above ground, but not what's underneath it," Mintz said. Despite those changes, "we're basically on budget," he said.

The project also includes extensive roadwork both inside the shopping center property and -- as most visitors to Augusta have come to realize -- on nearby feeder streets.

Crews are working on Western Avenue, posting new traffic lights at the shopping mall's entrance at Storey Street and creating a new exit intersection just to the east of the Irving gas station. They also realigned the westbound side of the city's main artery to create a left-turn lane that will eliminate the current "jug handle" turnaround in front of Evergreen Dental.

Renovations along Capitol Street Extension are complete.

Augusta City Manager William Bridgeo said responsibility for overseeing street improvements lies with state transportation officials.

But he said he has asked city engineers to keep an eye on the project, particularly after he said he observed new utility poles being installed in the center of sidewalks along Western Avenue.

"I questioned how a handicapped person would handle that, or the sidewalk (snow) plow," Bridgeo said.

Bridgeo said project officials hadn't foreseen the problems the utility poles might create in the sidewalks and they promised to curve walkways around the poles.

"The road work is going slower than expected in some spots, but in other spots we're in good shape," Mintz said. "The main entrance and the access drive (within the mall) is in pretty good shape, but we're a little bit behind" on work on nearby public streets.

He said that new traffic lights were being installed this week for both the mall's entrance and exit roads and should start functioning before the shopping plaza opening.