Five Beachwood residents filed a petition with the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections on Oct. 31, 2013, after five months of debate, in protest of the proposed Beachwood mall expansion, according to Cleveland.com.

On Oct. 7 General Growth Properties, the Chicago-based owner of the mall, agreed to eliminate plans to build a “7- to 9-foot concrete wall that would separate homes on Richmond Drive from the shopping center and add a metal safety and security fence, a 3-foot berm, numerous trees and underground drainage system,” according to Cleveland.com.

This did not appease petitioners who also wanted to change the city’s charter.

These Beachwood residents were unhappy because General Growth Properties had not changed the site plan to meet residents’ requests.

On Dec. 6, 2013, Harvey Siegel, Edgar Bernstein, Herschel Cohen, June Taylor and Ronnie Kertesz retracted the petition.

Cohen explained the reason they retracted the petition, according to Cleveland.com.

“City Council passed the ordinance and there’s no need to go forward with it. There’s no need to have a public vote,” Cohen said.

The Beachcomber has made efforts to contact the petitioners, but at publication, we have not received a response.

According to Cleveland.com, Sheldon Berns, Attorney at Berns, Ockner, and Greenberger LLC, a father of one of the past city-council candidates and a former city councilman himself, started this petition idea.

Beachwood Place General Manager Rob Clarke said there will still be a buffer between homes and the mall.

“The adjacent properties will be redeveloped to include a 60-foot landscape buffer and additional parking.”

On Nov. 18, 2013, after another month of debate, City Council adopted legislation to expand the popular Beachwood Place shopping mall.

A special election to vote on the petition proposals would have been held on Feb. 4, 2014, but was cancelled because the Beachwood residents who filed the petition withdrew it. This cancellation spared Beachwood taxpayers $23,000.

Although these debates were happening around the time of the mayoral and city council election, Mayor Merle Gorden wrote that this did not affect his campaign at all.

“While this issue was being discussed during my reelection campaign, I treated it as I would any such issue at any other time,” he wrote. “Let’s examine the facts, collect the public’s views and determine what is best for our community and the future of Beachwood.”

The designs on the city’s website states that “the planned addition of approximately 77,000 square feet of retail space will be located between Saks Fifth Avenue and Nordstrom, wrapping the current mall exterior … Approximately 27,000 square feet will be in three freestanding, one-level restaurants.”

In order to expand to a total of 1,002,648 gross square footage, the mall had to buy the surrounding residential property, City Council Vice President Mark Wachter said.

“What the mall requested was to take some of the area around Richmond [Road] which is zoned residential and rezone it for them,” Wachter said. “In order to get property rezoned, you have to make an application to city council [which takes at least] 90-120 days just to get the rezoning…”

Rezoning, Wachter wrote, is rather simple.

“Rezoning is a legislative process whereby the zoning of an area of land is changed, allowing it to be used in a different fashion or causing its use to be restricted in a way it had not previously,” Wachter wrote.

“… Rezoning property from ‘auto park and service station’ to retail would restrict the use of that property so that it could no longer be used for a gas station or car dealer, but could only be used for retail stores,” Wachter cited as an example.

There were concerns early on that the expansion would impede traffic. Wachter said that traffic will not be affected by the expansion at all.

“The impact on traffic in the area was very, very slight,” he said.

According to Gorden, the expansion will create “150 to 200” more jobs and benefit Beachwood’s schools.

“Beachwood Place Mall pays more than $4.2 million that goes directly to the Beachwood City Schools,” he wrote. “That number is likely to increase with the proposed expansion.”

“We continually look at opportunities to improve the shopping center to meet the needs of our customers,” Clarke wrote. “…In order to accommodate the demand, it is necessary to expand to meet the needs of the retailers and continue to offer our customers the best shopping experience possible.