Town Center at Cobb reopened Wednesday after the Kennesaw mall was forced to close briefly due to its power being shut off.
The shopping center had its electricity turned off Tuesday by Georgia Power, which said the owner was “highly delinquent” on bills despite a grace period. The power company confirmed Wednesday that power was restored after the mall’s owners “met necessary requirements.”
The mall reopened at 11 a.m. Wednesday. Shoppers milled around on what seemed to be a fairly typical slow midweek morning.
Mike Kohan, the founder of Kohan Retail Investment Group that owns the mall, said Wednesday that the power bill was now up to date and paid.
“We’re going to be talking to the tenants,” Kohan said. “We will accommodate them in any way and shape possible.”
In a Tuesday statement, Georgia Power said it had tried to work with Kohan Retail, which bought the mall two years ago, for several months and “provided numerous solutions to assist them in avoiding disconnection.”
The utility said “any customer that is highly delinquent in paying their bills ultimately has a negative impact for all of our customers.” Georgia Power said Tuesday it could “no longer continue to extend the grace period.”
It’s unclear how long the “grace period” lasted before the lights went out Tuesday morning. It’s also not clear how many employees were unable to work at the roughly 140 tenants.
Signs on the locked doors Tuesday afternoon said the mall was closed “due to unforeseen circumstances.”
Kohan Retail, an investment company based in New York that owns malls across the country, purchased Town Center in 2023 after it went into foreclosure.
The mall’s anchor stores — Macy’s, JCPenney and Belk — were unaffected by the power shutoff and remained open Tuesday. Kohan Retail owns the core of the mall, but the big box stores and other segments have different owners.
A few customers arrived Tuesday, discovered the mall was closed and drove away. Just over a dozen cars were parked near each of the department stores that remained open — a bleak showing compared to the mall’s peak attendance rates.
The mall has 1.3 million square feet of retail space on its 92-acre property between I-75 and I-575. The surrounding area along Barrett Parkway, which has its own community improvement district called Town Center CID, has had a surge in new development and housing. But the mall has struggled in recent years.
Tracy Styf, the CID’s director, said in a statement that the community is “aware of the current challenges facing the mall and its tenants, businesses and employees,” and that the CID is “working closely with our economic development partners to identify resources and information to support affected businesses and employees.”
Other regional malls nationwide have shuttered in the wake of online shopping and the COVID-19 pandemic. Some Atlanta-area malls have been reimagined or redesigned into mixed-use developments, often with apartments, office space, entertainment attractions and other uses.
Town Center is not Kohan Retail’s first site to have the power shut off, according to news reports.
KAKE, an ABC affiliate television station in Kansas, reported last year that a local mall owned by the same company had its power turned off five times in seven months. The station also found that other Kohan Retail-owned malls faced similar issues.
Note: If your job was affected by the mall’s closure, please email AJC staff writer Taylor Croft at Taylor.Croft@ajc.com.
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