Two years ago this month, longtime tenants of Southampton Shopping Center were airing many concerns about the commercial area’s conditions and future.

A lot can change in two years.

This week, some of those same merchants who feared for the viability of the shopping plaza not only have renewed their leases, they also point out the center has just one vacancy.

Since the May 2012 meeting with then-acting Economic Development Manager Mario Giuliani and Duane Oliveira, a member of the city’s Economic Development Board, about a dozen of the 40 tenants formed a Southampton merchants subcommittee under the umbrella of the Benicia Chamber of Commerce.

Now, not only is that panel in conversation with Weingarten Realty, the Houston, Texas, company that owns the center, but Weingarten has supported several of the merchants’ promotional events, too.

That’s a big change from the meeting two years ago, when Giuliani and Oliveira heard shopping center tenants complain that Weingarten hadn’t been keeping the property in proper condition to make it appealing to new tenants or customers.

Some long-term tenants had already relocated or closed, the merchants who filled the room said. Other companies would move later.

ABC Music and Bookshop Benicia left Southampton for new locations on First Street. Southampton Pet Hospital moved to East L Street. Verizon’s office closed, too, and added to the vacancies.

Among the most outspoken merchants at that meeting was Gene Pedrotti, who owns Pedrotti Ace Hardware, a business that has been in his family for 90 years.

He described the decline in landscaping, how parking spaces were being taken up with recycling and clothing donation bins, and how tired the center looked, with crooked signs and deteriorating paint.

But Pedrotti wasn’t the only one to voice concerns.

“The treatment of tenants is borderline medieval,” Todd Bigelow, owner of the shopping center’s Round Table Pizza restaurant, said at the time.

Tenants told Giuliani and Oliveira that Weingarten had disbanded the formerly active merchants association.

After that meeting, Pedrotti and Bigelow went to the Benicia Chamber of Commerce and started consulting with Stephanie Christiansen, the organization’s executive director. Joined by other Southampton tenants who are Chamber members, they formed the subcommittee and started meeting regularly to discuss their options.

Christiansen said it can be complicated for a business owner, who is focused on making a success of his or her company, to take on additional tasks, particularly one as broad as negotiating for improvements at a shopping center.

However, “We were able to assist in that effort,” she said, including helping to determine what different tenants hoped to accomplish and encouraging Weingarten to meet with the merchants.

“We tried to get everybody together” and make it a positive experience, she said.

Acknowledging that initially there had been “negative feelings for a while,” Christiansen said, “That certainly has disappeared. We’ve been able to assist with communication and organization,” she said. That’s led to “a nice partnership. I think they are happy.”

And now, she said, many tenants have the confidence to stay in the shopping center and improve their storefronts.

This week, both Bigelow and Pedrotti expressed optimism about the changes that have occurred at the shopping center.

Bigelow, in particular, was happy about his restaurant’s complete makeover, something he said was an uncertainty at one time.

He said he knew two years ago that the restaurant needed some sprucing. “But two years ago, I was wondering if we would be here,” he said.

As the subcommittee became more active and his hope grew for the shopping center, he decided to renew his lease, obtain loans and design a new interior based on Round Table guidelines.

“We gutted it and started over,” Bigelow said. “Once we got the signal, I said, ‘Let’s get this place remodeled.’”

His banquet rooms and main dining room are redone, the game room is larger, the salad bar has been moved to provide better flow, and from top to bottom the restaurant has new decor, he said.

Pedrotti’s hardware store has undergone renovation, too. Among the bigger changes he made, based on scientific studies, was to change how his customers line up at checkout stands.

Instead of queuing up at individual cash register stations, they now form a single line to wait for the next available cashier. He said studies show it’s a speedier, more efficient system, and it reduces shoppers’ frustration, especially when a new register station opens and those who have been waiting longer miss out on getting into the new line.

Pedrotti said he’s been teased that he’s copied the Fry’s Electronics style of sending customers through a single checkout line, but the system is in place at other retailers, including Michael’s, a hobby and craft company, and JoAnn Fabrics.

The hardware store also has opened an area Pedrotti called “The Paint Studio,” adding a line of paint, Valspar, alongside Clark and Kensington and other paints Ace has offered in the past.

Pedrotti said Ace will celebrate the Paint Studio’s opening Saturday and Sunday with a buy-one-gallon-of-paint-get-one-free sale

Both men predicted that Raley’s, the center’s major tenant, will announce its own renovations next month, including the addition of an in-house chef.

But more than their own individual businesses, the two men are happy with the direction Southampton is going.

Top of their list is that the center is full, with the exception of a small storefront near the corner of the L-shaped shopping center.

“It’s 95-percent leased,” Pedrotti said.

What else has changed?

“A ton of stuff,” he said.

“They redid the area in front of Pet Food Express,” he said of Weingarten’s improvements. New landscaping there will require minimal water use, he said — a style of planting that is expanding gradually to other areas of the shopping center.

After others complained about lighting, Weingarten has retrofit lamps to light-emitting diode (LED) illumination.

Among the new tenants are Huckleberry’s, part of a small Central Valley restaurant chain that has “a personable flair” that fits with Benicia’s small-town atmosphere, Pedrotti said.

“Huckleberry’s out of the gate has been swamped,” he said. Across the parking lot in a separate commercial island, Panda Express also has been drawing crowds, and recently enhanced its outdoor seating.

Bigelow pointed out that another fairly new tenant, Dollar Tree, moved into four vacant spots.

“They’ve been able to get people in here to the shopping center,” he said. Of the companies that moved elsewhere, he said, “I hear they’re doing great, so it’s worked out well.”

Bigelow said the cooperative effort between the merchants’ subcommittee and Weingarten is bringing back activities the shopping center had in years past.

For instance, Weingarten bought much of the candy that was given out by merchants and employees during Halloween 2013, he said. That candy give-away hadn’t happened for some time.

Also, “Santa came here for three days,” he said. The jolly elf spent three Saturdays in a row last December in a space provided by the property owners, with the help of subcommittee members.

The shopping center is looking better, too, Bigelow said. “They repainted it,” he said. “They really seem to be more approachable about tenants’ needs.”

And Weingarten and the merchants subcommittee will collaborate on more events designed to attract shoppers to Southampton, he said.

In addition, the company has promised to match some of the funds the subcommittee hopes to raise through dues, to help pay for those events.

There are still issues. The center’s parking situation still needs to be addressed, particularly since city staff discovered the center’s lot is 100 spots shy of what it should have.

“That only came to light recently,” Bigelow said. But he anticipates that the city, the tenants and the property owner will be able to resolve the shortage amicably.

He said the shopping center “could always use more foot traffic,” and he expressed hope some of the improvements will help.

One of the biggest improvements on the horizon is that Comcast is bringing broadband Internet service to the shopping center.

“We never had that before,” Bigelow said.

At one time, Comcast had told one merchant it would take $50,000 for the infrastructure to get high-speed Internet solely to that company, Christiansen said. So as the Chamber representative, she, the merchants committee and Weingarten met with Comcast about the center’s needs, and Comcast representatives offered to bring broadband to the center without that up-front charge if 15 businesses signed up for service on a no-contract obligation basis.

“We had half that number the day of the meeting,” Bigelow said. He expressed hope the service would be installed during summer.

Meanwhile, the subcommittee meets monthly at Bigelow’s restaurant, Christiansen said, and “we’re working on a website for the shopping center” — another tool the tenants never had before, which she expects to be online before summer ends.

“The center has become more active,” Pedrotti said. “This is a good sign, and the taxes go to the city. This is the first solid bit of good news since that economic development meeting. It’s looking good.”