Bayshore to remove remaining vehicles Saturday

On Saturday at 8 a.m. Bayshore Town Center will begin removal of the remaining vehicles on the third level of the Silver Spring Garage, officials said Friday.

“An industrial crane fitted for vehicle removal will be used to transfer the vehicles to the lower lot next to Rocky Rococo’s. Vehicles will be extracted one at a time and each removal is approximately 30 minutes, with the entire process completed by Noon. Bayshore has coordinated vehicle retrieval with all owners,” officials said.

The parking structure at Bayshore Town Center that partially collapsed last month was due to snow removal services piling snow in the wrong area, said the president of Milwaukee-based contractor.

Jesse Hoffmann, president and CEO of The MCR Group, said he “wasn’t surprised at all” when he heard the third floor of the Silver Spring Parking Garage had partially collapsed onto the first floor Feb. 23.

The snowplow drivers “didn’t understand what they were doing,” said Hoffmann, a former snow removal contractor.

Hoffmann’s company was first hired in 2010 for snow removal service and worked for ten years before the mall’s new owners put the job out to bid. West Allis-based Winter Services currently provides snow removal services for Bayshore’s parking structures, a Bayshore Town Center spokesperson said.

Despite Hoffmann’s claim, Bayshore Town Center officials say they do not yet know the cause of the partial collapse and are still investigating.

When the parking structure collapsed, a pile of rubble, snow, and sleet fell through the overhang above the parking ramps before it crashed on the first floor and narrowly missed passing vehicles, surveillance video showed. It’s likely crews piled snow in the center of the third story parking lot instead of piling it near exterior walls with support beams underneath, the contractor said.

“Either they didn’t understand what they were doing or Bayshore itself directed them to do that,” Hoffmann said in an interview with The Daily Reporter. “Over 10 years, it would never have been an issue. We would have never piled snow there,” he added.

MCR Group lost the bid with Bayshore at the start of the 2021-22 season before Winter Services took over, Hoffmann said. When his company still worked at the outdoor mall, they would have multiple meetings with his team, management and the City of Glendale to cover snow removal service plans.

A new ownership group called Cypress Equities took control of the Bayshore Town Center around 2019 and put snow removal services out to bid, Hoffmann said. When the owners held pre-bid meetings with potential service providers, the MCR president said everyone asked him how to do the job.

When ownership changed, so did management, which is when communication began to break down, according to Hoffmann. Though Hoffmann’s company had detailed plans on how to remove snow from the third story of the parking structure, he said the new management team asked his firm to do things they had to refuse.

The Daily Reporter reached out to both Cypress Equities and Bayshore Town Center. Neither were available for comment before publication.

“I don’t think concrete was an issue. We’ve had 10 times the snow before, but we piled it elsewhere. It was how the job was done,” Hoffman said.

A National Weather Service Meteorologist told The Daily Reporter that 3.3 inches of sleet feel right before the structure partially collapsed, noting that sleet weighs more than snow.

On Wednesday, Bayshore Town Center management team members reunited shoppers and employees with dozens of vehicles that were stranded on the second floor of the parking structure for a week. Engineers created a makeshift ramp so the management team could drive cars down it.

Nobody was injured in the collapse, but crews had to remove three cars that were crushed, North Shore Fire Rescue officials said. Milwaukee had 3.3 inches of sleet a day prior to the collapse, a meteorologist from the National Weather Service said.

The parking structure, located near Trader Joe’s on Silver Spring Drive, was built in 2005-2006, Bayshore officials said. The engineers who designed the structure were on site and investigating the incident.