Original | Stafford kills $6.25 million Aquia Town Center tax-break deal

The option for millions of dollars in tax breaks for the owners of a once prosperous shopping center in North Stafford is dead.

The Stafford Board of Supervisor voted unanimously to terminate its contract with Mosaic Realty Partners, the owners of the Aquia Town Center, they say because agreements the Maryland-based firm made to clean up the center weren’t honored.

“I don’t want to do this. I don’t like doing this. We want businesses to come here. But they signed a contract and they’re not living up to their end. We have to stand with our contracts,” said Aquia District Supervisor Cindy Shelton, who motioned to end the agreement.

The supervisor in the next-door Griffis-Widewater District, Tinesha Allen, seconded the motion. ”It will be setting a bad president if we don’t pull the contract,” said Allen.

Under the agreement penned in June of last year, Mosaic stood to benefit from $6.25 million in incremental tax breaks if it lured new commercial development to the center within three years. The tax incentives would be based on new sales tax revenues generated by the new business at the shopping center.

There was also an expectation for Mosaic to make the property more visually appealing by removing longstanding piles of dirt and busted concrete, to mitigate issues with the aging and failing stormwater drains, and to replace the dilapidated marquee sign that stands at the entrance to the property on Route 1.

Mosaic appears to have done everything but the repair and replace the marquee sign. The sign now has white panels fixed to where pieces of the old sign have fallen away. And the sign, according to county documents, is what did in the deal.

County officials said it sent a letter to Mosaic on November 15, 2019, reminding them of the need to fix the sign. It went unanswered, they said.

Mosaic did not return a request for comment for this story.

Aquia Town Center began to go downhill after Stafford Marketplace opened in the early 2000s. In 2003, Shoppers Food Warehouse moved from the town center to the marketplace, and the relocation of the anchor store provided to be the nail in the coffin for the shopping center.

There was a glimmer of hope in 2007 when the property was acquired by a new owner, and a new commercial office building was added. But the retail didn’t follow, and that firm ended up subduing the property, selling a portion of it to a home builder that built Aquia 15 at Towne Center Apartments.

A second portion of the property — the middle of the property where the majority of the shopping center stood, as well as the now-demolished Regal Cinemas, was purchased by Mosaic in 2015.

Afterward, an attempt to lure a Harris Teeter grocery store to get center failed after the Board of Supervisors denied Mosaic’s request to give tax breaks for the grocery store in 2017.