Onondaga County set a May 14 deadline for developers to bid on the 65.6 acre ShoppingTown Mall site in DeWitt. Eighty-seven days later there is still no publicly named winner, and the county’s development agency has said it will not disclose who bid.
The old Macy’s storefront at ShoppingTown Mall still faces Erie Boulevard East behind a chain-link fence, its sign long since stripped, one of the last privately owned pieces of a 65.6-acre property the Onondaga County Industrial Development Agency has spent six years trying to reassemble. The mall shut its doors in March 2020, and by the county’s own count in the record, the property has now sat vacant for roughly six years and five months.
This story came from public records we pulled ourselves
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DeWitt residents driving Erie Boulevard East past the site see the same fenced-off parking lots and dark anchor stores they have seen since the pandemic closed the mall. What has changed since then is almost entirely paperwork: who owns which parcel, who is suing whom, and which private company holds the rights to build something new there. The mall’s physical footprint, roughly 750,000 square feet of retail space spread across 65.6 acres, has not moved. What has moved is the county’s legal position, from a partial owner negotiating with a private developer in 2021 to a near-total owner running its own bidding process in 2026.
OCIDA, the county’s industrial development agency, now owns every parcel on the site except that former Macy’s building, which is still controlled by Buffalo-based Benderson Development. On April 2, 2026, State Supreme Court Judge Joseph Lamendola approved OCIDA’s request to acquire the Macy’s parcel through eminent domain, clearing the last legal obstacle to full county control of the site. The agency’s offer for that parcel was $2.5 million, according to reporting on the ruling.
That single number is part of a longer ledger. OCIDA paid $3.5 million in 2020 to acquire the bulk of the mall property from its previous owner, Las Vegas-based Moonbeam Capital Investments, which had let school and county tax bills go unpaid. The agency separately paid $4.5 million to acquire the former Sears building and parcel from Transformco, the retailer’s parent company. Add the $2.5 million Macy’s offer, still subject to the eminent domain proceeding, and the county’s acquisition spending on the site totals $10.5 million.
None of that includes what the county has said it wants for the property going forward. Coverage of the April ruling put the county’s asking price for the full 65.6-acre site at $25 million, with officials describing that figure as negotiable in exchange for a proposal that delivers strong community value. Set against the $10.5 million the county has spent or offered to acquire the land, that asking price implies roughly $14.5 million of headroom before accounting for demolition, environmental remediation, or the cost of carrying and securing a mostly empty mall, expenses OCIDA has said it will not disclose in detail to bidders.
The site itself, according to the county Office of Economic Development’s own listing, covers roughly 750,000 square feet of building space, sits within five miles of the highway network, and is less than 15 miles from the Micron semiconductor site in Clay, a detail the listing highlights directly. The county has pointed to that proximity before. In coverage of the October 2025 developer shakeup, McMahon raised the possibility of the site’s vision expanding to include manufacturing space tied to the regional semiconductor buildout, alongside the housing and retail the site was originally planned around, though no such plan has been formally proposed or approved as part of the current RFP.
The legal fight that got the county this far took more than two years to resolve. OCIDA’s board voted 5-0 on February 15, 2024, to authorize eminent domain proceedings against the Sears and Macy’s parcels, giving both owners 45 days to negotiate before the county moved to condemnation. Sears’ owner, Transformco, and Macy’s owner, Benderson Development, both sued to stop the taking. The New York State Court of Appeals declined to hear the owners’ final appeal on September 19, 2025, letting lower court rulings in the county’s favor stand. The April 2026 order from Judge Lamendola followed roughly six months later, applying specifically to the Macy’s parcel.
The developer the county spent years lining up for this land is no longer part of the project. OHB Redev LLC, a partnership between Syracuse-based Hueber-Breuer Construction, DalPos Architects and the affordable housing developer Housing Visions, won a request for development proposals back in 2021 and spent the years since designing what it called District East, a mixed-use plan that cleared the State Environmental Quality Review Act process with 912 residential units, a mix of townhouses, condominiums and multifamily buildings, plus more than 250,000 square feet of retail and entertainment space. The plan carried a minimum construction cost of $450 million.
On October 23, 2025, County Executive Ryan McMahon announced OHB Redev would no longer be part of the project. The team had never been able to secure site control of the Sears and Macy’s parcels on its own, and with the eminent domain litigation still working through the courts, the arrangement had stalled. “This is not a step backwards. This is a step forward,” McMahon said at the time. Ryan Benz, OHB Redev’s managing partner, said in response that the firm had “dedicated a tremendous amount of time, energy, and financial resources to the vision for a re-purposed Shoppingtown.”
With OHB Redev out, the county’s Office of Economic Development started over. It issued a new purchase and development request for proposals for the ShoppingTown site on March 10, 2026, this time with the county itself holding title to nearly the entire property rather than relying on a developer to assemble parcels first. Proposals were due back to the county on May 14, 2026.
OCIDA published written answers to prospective bidders’ questions on April 20, 2026, and the responses show how tightly the agency is controlling information about the process. The agency confirmed it will not publicly disclose the names of companies that submit proposals. Certain financial details, including the cost of maintaining and securing the property, will stay confidential. No new sitewide utility survey has been completed for bidders to review, and no recent structural assessment of the mall’s parking garage is available either. The RFP also excludes one parcel entirely: the freestanding Chili’s restaurant, which sits on privately owned land outside the county’s control and outside the bid package.
Two tenants are still operating on the property despite all of this. KeyBank and the restaurant Scotch ‘N Sirloin remain under active leases on the site, running businesses next to buildings the county is simultaneously trying to tear down or repurpose. Their continued presence is one of the clearer signs that whatever comes next at ShoppingTown Mall will be built in phases around existing obligations, not as a single clean demolition. The freestanding Chili’s parcel sits outside the RFP entirely, privately owned and outside OCIDA’s control, which means any future site plan has to design around at least three occupied or independently owned pieces of land even after the Macy’s taking is finalized.
The vacancy has a longer financial history behind it than the current bidding round captures. Court and county records from the mall’s earlier ownership under Moonbeam Capital Investments describe a period in which the property’s school and county tax bills went unpaid for multiple years running, before the county’s 2020 purchase and the subsequent OCIDA-led acquisitions moved the tax obligation off private ownership entirely. That history is part of why the county has been willing to spend $10.5 million acquiring parcels rather than waiting for a private buyer to negotiate with three separate owners on its own timeline.
Today marks 87 days since the May 14 proposal deadline passed. In that time, the county has not publicly named a selected developer, disclosed how many proposals it received, or set a new public timeline for an announcement, based on the county Office of Economic Development’s own project page and available coverage of the process. That is a longer gap than the 45-day negotiation window OCIDA gave Transformco and Benderson Development back in 2024 before eminent domain proceedings began, and it comes after a redevelopment effort that has already run for more than five years since the county first announced plans to take over the property in November 2020.
The original 2024 case the county made for eminent domain projected the redevelopment would eventually generate an estimated $12 million in annual sales tax revenue, require a minimum $300 million in private investment, and support roughly 1,400 permanent jobs once complete, on top of construction-phase work. Those figures predate OHB Redev’s exit and the new RFP, and the county has not published updated projections tied to the 2026 bidding round. Whether the next developer’s proposal, whenever it becomes public, will approach the scale of the 912-unit, $450 million plan OHB Redev spent four years designing is one of the open questions the county has not yet answered.
For now, the numbers that are public paint a specific picture: a 65.6-acre property in the middle of DeWitt, $10.5 million spent or committed by the county to gain control of it, a $25 million asking price to hand it off, and 87 days of silence since the county’s own deadline for hearing from developers who want it.
Sources and verification
This article is based on the Onondaga County Office of Economic Development’s ShoppingTown Mall site listing, the March 10, 2026 purchase and development RFP issued for the property, WSYR/iHeart’s April 2, 2026 report on Judge Joseph Lamendola’s eminent domain ruling, CNYCentral’s October 23, 2025 report on OHB Redev’s exit from the project, CNYCentral’s report on the 912-unit District East SEQR plan and its timeline, CNYCentral’s report on OCIDA’s February 15, 2024 eminent domain vote and projected economic impact, and CNYCentral’s April 20, 2026 report on OCIDA’s written answers to bidder questions. Date math (days since the May 14, 2026 deadline, and time the property has sat vacant since March 2020) was calculated directly against today’s date, August 9, 2026.
