Why owners of ‘public nuisance’ Eastland Mall are now getting fined $1,000 a day
View a previous report on Eastland Mall’s permanent closure in the video player above.
COLUMBUS, Ohio (WCMH) — The owners of a shuttered mall in Columbus will be slapped with back-to-back fines, including one that stacks for every day they don’t follow an order, thanks to a Wednesday ruling in Franklin County Municipal Court.
Columbus City Attorney Zack Klein’s office announced Thursday that Eastland Mall Holdings, LLC, had been found in contempt of court over their namesake decaying mall that was labeled a “public nuisance” in June 2022. But the owners were already held in contempt of court in September 2022, meaning the new fines will stack on top of fines they were already facing.
They previously faced a $3,500 fine and another $250 for every day they did not clean up the property. With the judge’s new contempt order on Wednesday, Eastland Mall Holdings has an additional $10,000 charge on their hands, and will get billed $1,000 for every day the property’s code violations aren’t addressed.
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Items to clean up at the mall, located at 2740 S. Hamilton Rd., included litter, solid waste, graffiti and broken concrete. But to date, Klein said the owners haven’t fixed problems at their property, nor have they paid any of the fines that have added up against them.
“The Eastland Mall owners have shown no regard for their obligations to the city, to the court and to our friends and neighbors on the east side, and now they find themselves yet again in contempt of court and racking up fines,” Klein said.
In September 2022, the owners were given a month to begin daily trash pickup, and address parking lot issues like inadequate lighting, a developing sinkhole and other structural issues. Leading up to the contempt hearing in June, Klein secured a court order that marked Eastland Mall as a “public nuisance.”
Eastland Mall Holdings bought the 56-year-old Eastland Mall in 2015 for $9.7 million. The owners later decided to permanently close the mall at the end of 2022, forcing former tenants of the mall to look elsewhere for new locations.
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Klein previously secured the right to “demolish all structures on the subject property at defendant’s expense,” if the property wasn’t brought back into compliance with city code, according to a court order. Klein has not taken this measure yet as of Thursday, but in June 2023 the city council entered into an $850,000 contract with architect MKSK to plan the future of Eastland. As of June, that phase still won’t wrap up for at least another six months.
The City of Columbus also announced in November 2021 that it planned to turn 78 acres of land near Eastland Mall into a new park, and had acquired the acreage for about $1.5 million.
Take a virtual tour from 2017 of the Eastland Mall through Google Maps below:
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