Mortgage fraud taken to new heights

[elgordoboy]

Naturewalk?

 

[NotDeadYet]

This story sounds juicy. I've never heard about this. Please tell us more

Okay, you asked for it. And this is the short version.

The Green Empire is a good book ? it?s been a while since I read it though and if I remember correctly it is primarily about St Joe and their metamorphosis from paper company to "place builder." I?ve always been interested in the local fallout from the Topsail and Pt Washington forest purchases.
Most of the land was purchased in 1986 from St Joe, which was just a paper company back then, by an outfit called Emerald Coast Joint Venture. ECJV announced plans for homes, hotels, golf courses and even an airport. But before anything was built ECJV?s finances collapsed, taking down two savings and loans along with it, one of which was in Texas and another in Pennsylvania. In 1991 the Federal court indicted 14 people associated with ECJV on charges of conspiracy, bank fraud, mail fraud, and money laundering. There were some convictions and jail terms and some later appeals. The trial was long and confusing, with complicated documents, side deals, related corporations, multiple loans, allegations of threats, supposed involvement of Kuwaiti businessmen and so forth. It would have made a good movie, I think, lots of drama and shady characters. So when the S&L?s failed, the land ended up in the hands of the RTC and was eventually auctioned off on the Walton County courthouse steps. The Nature Conservancy bought it, really at the literal eleventh hour, and held it in trust while the state got its act together. A few tracts adjacent to Topsail had ended up in private ownership after originally being included in the ECJV sale. The state attorney general tried to confiscate them as having been part of the alleged fraudulent dealings of ECJV, and the state had to file condemnation suits and pay for those in order to acquire them for Topsail. All of this dragged on for a long time.
The state had wanted the Topsail property for quite a while, and I think some of that story is in the Green Empire. What a lot of people don?t remember or never knew is that the state also wanted the Pt Washington land. At one time there was even a phase two plan to acquire an additional ten thousand acres to create a greenway all the way from Georgia to the gulf in the eastern end of Walton County. But the local political climate was unfavorable. In fact, the county lobbied for years for a selloff of portions of what is now the state forest, including the Cassine nature trail. That is how the government center over on 331 came to be ? it was a compromise deal after a group of locals opposed attempts to remove portions of the forest from conservation. And all of this became intertwined with planning and growth management in Walton County. The state?s growth management act was passed in 1985 and it mandated that every county in the state have a comprehensive plan. When all that land was acquired by the state in 1992, Walton County still did not have a plan that complied with the 1985 act. The state legislature coughed up a bunch of money for the South Walton Conservation and Development Trust, which was an effort to finally produce a growth management plan for the county, and one of the reasons they did that was because of all the now state owned conservation land in the county. A lot of people think the plan, which was eventually passed in 1996, was something of a failure. I think compromise and politics played a big part in all of that. A lot of locals wanted one thing, low density and ?green? developments, and the county and the developers wanted something else. And the county was never on board about the whole thing anyway ? they looked at the purchase of all that land for conservation as a loss ? the loss of future tax revenues, development opportunities, and so forth. You can still see the fallout from all of that operating today. Personally I think there has been an undercurrent of ?give the developers whatever they want because there is limited land in SoWal available for private development? operating under the surface all these years. And I also think we are really lucky that the forest is intact and not littered with empty subdivisions, and that the beach at Topsail is unquestionably public.

 

[Busta Hustle]

So far...but as has been duly noted in this and other threads the abuse of the comp plan and the allowance of higher densities shows the struggle continues...sooner not later more small portions of the conservation lands will revert...