Gilbert’s SanTan Village progressing toward October opening

Sheila Hunter said she’s gotten in the habit of sleeping with a note pad and pencil by her bed.

Hunter, the senior property manager of the new SanTan Village shopping center at Williams Field Road and Loop 202 in Gilbert, said she frequently has restless nights and recurring nightmares as construction on the mammoth-sized regional mall winds down and the planned Oct. 26 opening nears.

“The speed is definitely picking up,” she said.

The note pad is for late-night brainstorming, or sudden ideas or concerns that plague Hunter’s sleep.

“I write on it almost every night,” she said.

Hunter isn’t alone as Westcor officials and hundreds of construction crew members, landscape workers, tenants, community and city officials and countless others buzz around the 120-acre shopping center, doing their part to make sure SanTan’s opening comes on time and without a hitch.

“It’s like ants crawling all over the place,” said Garrett Newland, Westcor’s vice president of development.

Garrett said he, too, has experienced some sleepless nights, but that’s not surprising, considering what’s on the line. SanTan is a multi-million dollar regional mall that’s been decades in the planning. The outdoor mall is the culmination of a 20-year dream for residents and Gilbert officials who included it in the town’s general plan in the 1980s. Residents approved an $80 million bond issue for infrastructure in 2003 and the town expects the mall to draw customers from a 20-mile radius.

Add to that a roster of about 130 tenants, most of whom are supposed to open on the same day and it’s easy to see how the pressure can be immense for anyone involved.

“(The) last four months here are critical,” Newland said.

On any given day, officials are meeting with city staff to obtain last-minute design accommodations, working with construction crews, giving tours and updates to community groups, marketing the new project to nearby residents in order to keep the buzz going, meeting with prospective tenants. Concerns and responsibilities for Westcor range from a myriad of small details like figuring how to keep rain water out of unfinished buildings during the monsoon season to the most critical imperatives like making sure the center has power on opening day.

As Hunter said, one of the big challenges is trying to know the unknown and predict the unpredictable.

“We really are going to have to make sure that we cross our T’s and dot our I’s,” she said.

So far, Westcor officials said they’ve had great success. In June the first trickle of retail tenants — Gordon Biersch, Pacific Sun, The Buckle, and Ann Taylor Loft — started their own work on the interiors and exteriors of their individual stores. In July, that trickle will become a deluge, with 25 to 30 stores all scrambling to complete tenant improvements.

Hunter said parts of the site have only recently started looking less like a construction zone and more like a shopping center with workers applying fresh coats of paint, gardeners planting fresh landscaping, and construction crews laying pavement.

Town Manager George Pettit said the pressure hasn’t ended for town officials either. The development services office meets regularly with tenants and Westcor officials to help expedite the planning and permit processes involved in new development for the tenants. He said inspectors are on-site daily to check fire, engineering and building code compliance.

Pettit said one of his main worries is that the town maintain enough staffing within its relatively small development services office to accommodate the demands required by a center of such a massive scope and scale as SanTan.

“This project doesn’t end on Oct. 26,” he said. “This is just the first phase of the overall site development.”