COLUMN: Red Flags At University Beach
*This is an opinion column*
NORTHPORT, AL — I told whoever would listen in late September that frustrations over the Northport City Council approving the creation of the University Beach Improvement District, while justified, would be more valuable down the line when city leaders take up the formation of a special tax district to oversee the city's end of the partnership agreement for the proposed $350 million resort.
{p/p}And this is where we've found ourselves.
As Patch reported on Thursday, the Northport City Council next week will hear the first reading of a resolution for the creation of the University Beach Capital Improvement Cooperative District and its board of directors — a three-member body appointed by the City Council to oversee the flow of sales tax revenue generated by the project once it begins doing business.
Never mind that the City Council had no formal input on who those candidates are but we'll get to that in due time.
ALSO READ: Northport Leaders Remain Hog-Tied After Entering University Beach Agreement
The three proposed candidates for the board will be Elite Recruiting CEO Steven Fikes; group home operator Shaferris Porter; and Allison Rush, who works as the clinic manager at Pickens County Primary Care.
But while Patch was able to confirm the names of the three potential board members before they were ever published by City Hall Friday afternoon in the agenda packet for Monday's regular meeting, little else is known about the selection process that got us to this point.
For those just now getting up to speed on this story, it's fair to say that if anybody tells you that there is any real ground-level support in Northport for the proposed $350 million incarnation of the University Beach resort, they will either be grossly misinformed or lying.
Indeed, a little more than a couple of weeks ago the most powerful and deep-pocketed elected body in the metro — the Tuscaloosa County Commission — unanimously voted to send a letter to the Army Corps of Engineers requesting a temporary hold on any permits issued to the developers of the controversial University Beach resort development in Northport.
This tracks with the countless conversations I've had with members of the Commission, who have only expressed skepticism to me in the months since Northport entered the partnership agreement.
On the other side of the Black Warrior River, the deal in Northport has also taken a lot of heat off of Tuscaloosa City Hall as it moves forward with big-ticket projects like the Saban Center and the contentious Sports Illustrated resort off of Rice Mine Road.
Simply put, though, the proposed lagoon resort in Northport has turned the city into an absolute laughingstock — reducing my rapidly growing hometown to little more than the butt of dry municipal government jokes in small towns from Mobile to Huntsville.
Northport District 4 Councilwoman Jamie Dykes has been a longstanding opponent of the proposed resort and was one of two opposition votes when the Council approved the creation of the University Beach Improvement District.
She was also one of only two elected officials willing to speak on the record about the latest chapter of the University Beach saga.
I did speak at length with all but two Northport elected officials ahead of this story, though, and the prevailing sentiment when given the opportunity came into sharp focus.
Fear.
Fear of public blowback.
Fear of litigation.
Fear of internal retaliation inside City Hall.
Fear of getting voted out of office.
And fear of the sheer uncertainty of what could come from such a contentious local issue.
"These people are supposed to be chosen by the entire City Council and I have never seen or heard of these people as it relates to serving on the Cooperative District board," Dykes told Patch of the proposed board candidates.
It should be noted here that Patch reported in February following the vote to enter the partnership agreement that Dykes went on the record to say she'd felt intimidated to support the project and became a pariah among her elected colleagues when she openly opposed it.
"I was never made aware that we were taking applications for this — if that's how it was done," she told me on Friday. "I simply don't know what the process was. I don't even know if there was an application process or anything of the sort."
This brings us back to the root cause that led Northport to this point.
As I previously reported over the summer , multiple sources speaking independently of one another to Patch on the condition of anonymity insisted that former Council President Jeff Hogg, who resigned in March amid a deluge of public backlash over the University Beach project, had since been actively working to recruit potential members for the Capital Improvement Cooperative District board.
Hogg flatly denied these claims at the time and, while I had no choice but to take him at his word, qualified sources needled me to take it with a grain of salt and keep digging.
So I did.
By and by, Tuscaloosa Patch obtained more conclusive evidence in the form of a digital exchange, that gives much more credibility to the allegations that the former council president is still pulling the strings from exile.
I've chosen not to elaborate further on this piece of evidence solely to protect my source but, suffice it to say, it shows Hogg following up on an individual's interest in serving on the improvement district board.
This came well after I had been told by other qualified and independent sources that Hogg was jockeying for a seat on the Capital Improvement Cooperative District board, so things were beginning to come into sharper focus.
Now let's skip ahead to Thursday when the proposed candidates for the board were independently confirmed by Patch. While the agenda for Monday's regular City Council meeting was pushed out on Thursday and did show the agenda item for the first reading of the special tax district resolution, there was no other information provided as to the candidates.
For those unfamiliar with how City Hall releases its agendas and accompanying material, the documents are usually provided with a "packet" that has other necessary documents —copies of full resolutions on the agenda and other materials for the items being considered during the meeting. On any other day, it's incredibly boring for the average citizen.
The agenda packet for the upcoming meeting on Monday, Oct. 21, was published at 1:35 p.m. Friday and can be viewed here .
To make matters even more concerning, though, there has been even less transparency from Northport City Hall than normal about the appointment process that culminated in the three aforementioned candidates.
This leaves far more questions than answers, with the best place to start being radio silence and vague platitudes from city leaders when directly asked how the candidates were chosen.
To this end, one concern I can address for you without having to confirm it with official sources is that there was no application process for the Capital Improvement Cooperative District — at least as far as City Hall is concerned.
Common sense dictates that if there wasn't an application portal or public advertisements encouraging interested candidates to apply, then there is no other alternative apart from the candidates being hand-picked.
This brings me to my next question: Who selected the candidates?
You're likely to get a range of different answers, depending on who you ask inside Northport City Hall.
A theme that unifies the responses, however, is that "we don't really know."
To that end, the only elected official to provide any kind of honest insight into their role was District 2 Councilman Woodrow Washington.
Washington, one of two Black members of the City Council, did not elaborate on the overall process but did tell Patch that he was responsible for the selection of Shaferris Porter — the only Black candidate nominated for the Cooperative District board.
"I threw a name out months ago," he told me.
He then said he succeeded in securing some diversity and minority representation on the board of directors. If this board is inevitably going to become a thing, I'm fine with that being his expressed rationale.
Other city leaders weren't as forthcoming and told me that they either weren't familiar with the dynamics of the selection process or referred me to City Attorney Ron Davis.
Davis told Patch Friday that applications for both the Improvement District and Cooperative District were submitted as applications to the city, as was anticipated in the partnership agreement passed by the City Council in February.
Following along closely here, dear reader.
The answer I received to my question was vague and I've yet to receive a response to a follow-up when I asked for clarity on the dynamics of the process.
Davis went on to say in his initial response that Northport is contractually obligated to cooperate in good faith with the developer in their efforts for any special tax district on their land.
"Neither the Improvement District or the Cooperative District would have any control over any activities except on the current site owned by University Beach," Davis said, before mentioning that the Cooperative District application was submitted by attorneys from Birmingham's Maynard Nexsen.
While Davis did technically respond to my question, he did little to answer how the three candidates had been selected by the developers to then be considered by the City Council.
"It looks like a couple of council members and others hand-picked these candidates," District 4 Councilwoman Jamie Dykes told Patch on Friday. "I find it hard to believe that the developers submitted these candidates without the knowledge of our residents and without going through the proper application process, which would have given the council and citizens information needed to make a fair and unbiased decision."
With little else to do but speculate at this point, though, I'm left scratching my head over why these specific candidates were chosen.
For example, Elite Recruiting CEO Steven Fikes — a close personal friend of Jeff Hogg — was one of the only people to voice public support for University Beach at the City Hall citizen lectern when the Council voted in February to enter the partnership agreement with the project's Texas-based developers.
While I'm sure Fikes is a decent man and I know he cares about his community, he is something of a questionable choice among the three potential board members, and not just because of his well-known connections to the former City Council president who headed up the initial charge to enter into the University Beach partnership agreement.
According to a federal tax lien obtained by Patch from Tuscaloosa County Probate Court records that was submitted on Sept. 27, Elite Recruiting owed over $120,000 in unpaid back taxes less than a month ago.
In just calling balls and strikes: Is this the kind of business sense Northport residents are confident can manage the flow of sales tax revenue to the University Beach developers?
City leaders also acted shocked when I asked them about this revelation and seemed to agree that there hadn't seemed to be much in the way of vetting the candidates before they submitted their applications.
Regardless, such liens are a matter of public record and not very difficult to find, so I can't help but think that one of two things happened here: Either officials in City Hall were aware of the federal tax liens against Elite Recruiting and chose to look the other way or they simply didn't put forth any effort to conduct a basic background check on any of the candidates.
There is a third option that exists, however, that is far and away the most troubling hypothetical and what seems to be the closest thing to the truth as this reporter understands it.
City Attorney Ron Davis seemed to confirm in his previous statement that it wasn't City Hall but the University Beach developers who handpicked the three candidates for the Cooperative District Board of Directors.
So let's unpack that because it's a great starting point.
First, it's common knowledge that two of the developers on the project are from Texas, while another participating investor is from California.
None of these three individuals have any longstanding connections to Northport apart from each of them being members of the University Beach Improvement District Board of Directors that was established by the council in September.
This stands in stark contrast to the proposed makeup of the Cooperative District Board of Directors, which would consist of three Tuscaloosa County residents with unrelated professional backgrounds if approved by the Northport City Council in the coming days and weeks.
While this is certainly no slight against anyone's character or profession, their bonafides — and mine, for that matter — don't seem to qualify them to manage sales tax revenue payouts to the developers who seemed to have recruited and handpicked them.
Few in Northport are likely thinking about the proposed Sports Illustrated resort in Tuscaloosa but it's a project worth thinking about that provides a wealth of contrasts with University Beach.
As an update for the development, local media widely reported earlier this week that the Tuscaloosa City Council tabled its vote over the development until the next regular council meeting on Tuesday.
But when stacked up with the University Beach project, the proposed development in Tuscaloosa is quite comparable in terms of the money being spent and the headaches it's causing, while being the polar opposite of how the city and developers have handled the project.
District 3 Councilor Norman Crow hosted a community town hall for the project this week and told Patch that the City of Tuscaloosa did not offer the resort developers a single dime in incentives or tax abatements on the front end of the project's progression.
In contrast, the City of Northport entered into a 30-year partnership agreement that committed up to $20 million in up-front bond money for University Beach, while also agreeing to give the developers $61,058,17 in sales tax revenue generated by the resort once it begins operating.
For Tuscaloosa, Crow said the issues have been more about unanswered questions but said the Tuscaloosa City Council is united in its qualified skepticism of certain aspects of the project.
Meanwhile, Crowd said the developer has shown a willingness to listen to and act upon the feedback.
"I think the well was poisoned from the start with the way it was rolled out," Crow told Patch, which echoed many of the concerns expressed about the University Beach project. "You have the obvious issues here like traffic and environmental impacts, but when the building renderings came out, a lot of people were concerned about the nine-story hotel and look of it. So we began to ask how all of this was going to work."
Crow would only speak to the merits and concerns of the proposed development in Tuscaloosa but provide a relevant contrast when asked about major economic incentive packages offered by the city to certain projects.
Enter Tuscaloosa real estate mogul Stan Pate — a real-life Charles Dickens character who I'm thankful to call a dear friend.
Like "Sympathy for the Devil" by the Rolling Stones, he always ends up becoming relevant in some way or another in big-picture stories.
Crow pointed to the city's incentives package for Pate's proposed dream redevelopment of the McFarland Mall property and said that it was a point of pride for the city that they could reach an agreement with the shrewd developer without committing any money on the front end.
"We're not out any money unless [Pate] puts infrastructure in and he has a tenant and they start doing business," Crow explained as he touted the merits of the project if it comes to fruition. "We're going to abate taxes on a finished product, we're not giving them anything upfront."
I mention that anecdote about the McFarland Mall because of the size and scope of the project, and tough negotiations on the front end. Folks at odds came together.
But when talk circled back to the proposed Sports Illustrated development, Crow spoke to the Tuscaloosa City Council coming together and deciding to take a cautious approach.
Maybe they had the benefit of learning from Northport's mistake, as I'm sure many will suggest, but experience tells me that's not the case.
Indeed, Crow confirmed to me that the developers for the Sports Illustrated resort intend to pull their application at Tuesday's meeting. From there, Crow said the developers want to better tailor the project to the desires of city leaders but, more importantly, the surrounding community.
I briefly provided two examples of how major projects on par with University Beach have been effectively navigated in the face of pretty substantial skepticism and pushback.
Meanwhile, in Northport, city leaders are over a barrel after entering the partnership with developers in February.
One elected official speaking on background agreed with my analogy that the agreement had the developers leading our elected body around on lease — faced with angry constituents on one side and fear of litigation over a breach of contract on the other.
"I don't know how we got to this point," one elected leader told me, unironically. "And I really don't know how we're going to get out of this."
Ryan Phillips is an award-winning journalist, editor and opinion columnist. He is also the founder and field editor of Tuscaloosa Patch. The opinions expressed in this column are in no way a reflection of our parent company or sponsors. Email news tips to
