GARFIELD HEIGHTS — City View was supposed to save this suburb.



The plan was to turn trash into treasure, by building a destination shopping center on top of a former landfill.

Mountains of decaying garbage, cratered with oozing orange ponds, would be replaced with mammoth stores in seas of freshly paved parking lots. Transportation Boulevard would link Interstate 480 to Rockside Road and Interstate 77, $1 billion in office parks, restaurants and hotels. Overtaxed "Garbage Heights" would become a retail king.

It could have been a fairy tale.

"Our taxes were so high. This was our way out," said Thomas Longo, the 26-year mayor of the inner-ring suburb.

The first phase opened with fanfare in 2006, a strip of squares -- Giant Eagle, Dick's Sporting Goods, Wal-Mart, each with their familiar fronts -- and smaller chains, looking onto a big mound of dirt. Since then, developers have slogged through endless Ohio Environmental Protection Agency violations; big-box stores opened eight miles away at Steelyard Commons; Wal-Mart closed its store, citing safety concerns; and the economy crashed.

Now, owner City View Center LLC has failed to pay its mortgage, while the shopping center sits three-quarters empty and the road that would connect it to more potential shoppers remains undone. The happily-ever-after end of $2.9 million in property and income taxes never materialized.

In a year, developer John McGill said, the place could be deserted.



"The concept of taking a landfill and making it into a shopping mall was bold and imaginative," said Paul Oyaski, Cuyahoga County director of development. "But it might have been more complicated than originally thought."

EPA issues

The city and developers blame the Ohio EPA, which has had to approve every step of construction, including venting the trash underground for methane gas, a potentially explosive byproduct of decaying garbage. The agency oversaw the 2-foot clay cap that serves as a methane barrier, the foot-thick gravel bed and ventilation system beneath the stores, and the thousands of steel pilings pounded through the garbage base to bedrock to support the structures.

"I think we at least substantially followed the rules of the permit that was issued in 2005," said McGill, who had never before built on a landfill.

The agency dragged out approvals and added mandates, he said. Publicity over violations also scared away potential customers.

The EPA counters that if City View had been built to the approved specifications, problems would have been minimized, if not eliminated.

"We do not like the idea of having to shut City View down," Ohio EPA Director Chris Korleski said. "That's why we worked so hard to find measures to let it operate and operate safely."

In the past two years, EPA officials found potentially explosive levels of methane beneath the parking lot, meaning that if a lighted cigarette were dropped through a manhole, the gas could ignite. They documented a paving machine igniting a small methane fire, with flames rising through the grate of a parking lot drain. And they recorded examples of polluted water flowing into storm drains.

The state sued last year over the issues and settled in December, when developers pledged to install a $750,000 gas extraction system, capture polluted water, seal dozens of catch basins and pay a $1.2 million penalty.

Retail woes

That was too late for Wal-Mart, the biggest box on campus, which defected in September.

Longo believes the discounter's sales were down and so it used safety fears as an excuse to pull out; the store was never unsafe, he said.

Already Jo-Ann Stores Inc. had closed because of disappointing sales. Other stores followed: Petsmart, complaining its lease terms were violated because Home Depot never opened; and Circuit City, as the company closed stores across the country.

"Wal-Mart's the anchor," Oyaski said. "Wal-Mart's absence is going to reduce the amount of traffic."

Home Depot, J.C. Penney, Panera, Chic-Fil-A, Buffalo Wild Wings, Dollar Tree and a dental clinic were supposed to open stores, McGill said. They probably won't ever move in, because of Wal-Mart's departure and the negative press over environmental issues.

"Businesses like to deal in a nice, sane environment," Longo said. "They like things that are predictable and even-keeled. When things get knocked out of kilter, the big companies start exercising their options."

Even without the environmental problems, though, the center might have flopped.

That's because the Northeast Ohio retail market is glutted, said James Kastelic, a Cleveland Metroparks planner who has studied Northeast Ohio retail patterns for years.

The seven-county area surrounding Cleveland had 45 square feet of shopping floor space per person, according to a 2007 study. The national average is 19.5.

"A lot of these power centers have the same tenants," Kastelic said. "There's just a lot of shakeout, in terms of oversaturation."

So was it crazy to think a shopping center built on a former garbage dump in Garfield Heights could attract customers?

City View's competitors, namely Steelyard Commons in Cleveland and Harvard Park in Warrensville Heights, didn't exist when Longo started planning in 1996.

The mayor just knew that more than 100,000 motorists passed the site each day. That the landfill was a liability. And that Garfield Heights -- nicknamed the "City of Homes" -- lacked a commercial tax base.

The 7.7-square-mile city of 28,000 residents has the highest fixed tax rate in the region, about $714 for every $100,000 of home value. Last year, it slipped into fiscal emergency.

"If you can expand your tax base, a lot of your problems go away because you have tax money and flexibility to work with," Longo said.

So, with developers, he sketched out the concept of office parks, hotels and other development, jump-started with stores. A tax increment financing district would pay for improvements, including the expansion of Transportation Boulevard.

The idea makes sense, said New Jersey developer Joseph Wiley, who built a shopping mall, community college, office park and condos atop landfills.

Landfill redevelopments have been built in Arizona, California, Connecticut and Florida, among others. And the trend, Wiley said, has traveled as far as China.

"If you redevelop a contaminated site, you help preserve open space," he said. "You allow redevelopment in urban areas that people thought were useless."

The EPA also believes in the idea. A new Columbus office complex has been built on a landfill, with no major problems, said Korleski, of the Ohio EPA.

"I think it's a wonderful idea," he said. "But it will only work if done right. I think City View has shown that there's no room for error here."

What's next

Longo still believes his grand plan can succeed.

"There's a chance this whole project could be resurrected," said Longo, who is working to close the city's $3 million budget gap. "It's going to take time and careful handling. ... The whole concept is still on the table."

Oyaski agrees, though he believes the environmental issues need to be resolved before the city can attract other big-name tenants. And, of course, the economy must rebound.



McGill, who sold most of the finished development to City View Center LLC, wants to finish the Buffalo Wild Wings and the Dollar Tree store, both of which the EPA stopped for noncompliance. Or he wants to sell it all.

In the last few months, City View Center LLC has failed to make payments on its $81 million mortgage loan, a federal judge has appointed a Chicago real estate executive to manage the property, and the EPA has found four new monitoring violations.