Mildura City Heart traders meet to discuss mall’s future

THERE is a fresh focus by City Heart traders to get rid of Mildura’s Langtree Mall.

Sunraysia Daily learned that a meeting of traders was being organised for Thursday night to discuss the future of the contentious mall.

Mildura community wellbeing and services councillor Gavin Sedgmen confirmed late on Thursday that he planned to “catch up” with Langtree Mall traders “just to see how they’re travelling”.

Mildura City Heart management has not been invited to attend.

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Cr Sedgmen said he had been approached by several traders “to start a conversation”.

“It’s just me, as a councillor, doing some work on the whole subject and the Mildura City Heart mechanism to see whether or not it’s working,” he said.

“I don’t know who’s going, I just said that I’d like to catch up with anyone and have a look into their views and their thoughts.

“At the moment there seems to be a little bit of unrest and I personally just want to see how it is.”

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Cr Sedgmen said his personal view on the mall was that it was a “dead duck” and there were City Heart traders who had similar views.

“They have been quite passionate,” he said.

“The discussions I’ve had, and I’ve only spoken to three traders, but they want out, they want it gone because it’s destroying their businesses.

“The real estate agents can’t get people in there – they have got tenants who are prepared to rent shops, but no-one will go into a mall.”

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The Langtree Mall opened in the late 1980s to “make way for the future”, but has been plagued in more recent years by empty shops.

“I started asking questions because the vacancies in the mall is horrendous,” Cr Sedgmen said.

“There’s 44 shops inside the mall and 10 of them are vacant and there’s talk of two or three others who want to get out.

“Why is that?”

Cr Sedgmen said he understood the meeting of City Heart traders last night was expecting “a reasonable showing”.

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He said he raised questions about the mall’s viability at a council forum on Wednesday.

“You walk down the mall and it is dead empty – there’s no-one in it – there’s 10 empty shops and there’s talk of more going,” he said.

“Malls have failed – the Ballarat mall has died, Bendigo is dead, the Geelong Mall is dead.

“They are a hang-up from the late ’70s and early ’80s – everyone had to have a mall … but it doesn’t work.”

Cr Sedgmen said the meeting with traders was a “very, very preliminary discussion”.

“Mildura City Heart management will be part of it depending on what comes out of tonight’s meeting,” he said..

“If we rock up there and there are 15 or 20 traders and landlords and they are all screaming to get rid of it, then obviously we’ve got to start looking at what’s going on.”