Sorry, Colorado Mills. We see what you're hiding.
A tenant who owns three businesses inside Colorado Mills Mall in Lakewood invited Next in to see what he's going through since the May 8th hail storm, which is likely to be the costliest in state history.
"I'll take you on a little tour. It's pretty messed up right now," said Hakan Kurban, owner of Snack Stop, the popcorn kiosk and the train that runs through the mall.
"It's pretty humid there, as you can smell," said Kurban. "The health department was here. They told us to trash every perishable food we have, so we cannot resell it, which is about $50,000-$60,000 in product we have to trash."
Kurban walked Next through an entrance, into the mall that has a floor covered in tarps and into his Snack Stop store. Along the way, we saw some stores that appeared to be cleaned out, like T-Mobile and Lenscrafters, while GNC looked like it was ready for customers.
"We're just going to trash everything, there's nothing we can save here anymore," said Kurban. "(The) mall is going to fix all the walls. And you can imagine we call the insurance as soon as possible. We bought the insurance that the mall management told us and they are saying it's just liability and we are not getting a penny from them."
He said he only found out when he needed it most, that the contents in his businesses are not covered.
"We've been buying the same insurance, but nothing happened the last 10 years luckily, until this happened, then we called the insurance company to claim some of the stuff we're trashing. They say, 'You've just got liability, sorry. You need to buy another insurance to cover your property.' They call it 'content' insurance, you need content insurance other than the liability insurance," said Kurban.
Late Wednesday, Next reached out to the Colorado Mills PR representative who was quite helpful during the Target Rock adventures, but we have not heard back yet.
Inside Colorado Mills after the May 8 hail storm
Kurban walked us through his gutted store into the back storage area, where the merchandise sits waiting to be trashed.
"So you can see all the water I'm stepping on," he said. "And we got the big snow storm last weekend, I think. It was raining all over inside the mall. Even though it was sunny outside, the melting snow got into our store."
In the hallway between his shop and the storage area, we saw busy construction workers. Much of the drywall was already taken out in the hallway. It looked like a new building just under construction or being gutted and redone.
"We've been in the mall over 10 years. We love the mall, but now we are stranded and not many people are helping us, including mall management," said Kurban. "We're just getting emails once a week or so, saying we're going to open in six months. We're doing our best to fix the mall. But that's all we got from an update. We'll see, we're hoping to come back when they open."
