COLUMN: Northport Leaders Remain Hog-Tied After Entering University Beach Agreement

*This is an opinion column*

NORTHPORT, AL — There's something noble about the tenacity of those fighting for what seems to be a lost cause.

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The outnumbered Spartans at Thermopylae; "The Charge of the Light Brigade" immortalized in Tennyson's iconic poem; and the Boston Red Sox down three games to the New York Yankees in the 2004 American League Championship Series.

The list goes on and on.

Sometimes, despite facing down the unlikeliest of odds like those '04 Red Sox, the little guy, by force of miracle, comes out victorious and it's a true sight to behold — the stuff of Disney and Hallmark movies.

Others, like Tennyson's ill-fated Light Brigade, are simply gnarled and crushed by the inevitable power of progress. Even in defeat, though, their fight has lived on to inspire countless others.

What's yet to be determined is how history will remember a relatively small, yet pugnacious group of Northport citizens rallying under the banner of "Not In My Backyard" ... all as the Northport City Council slouches forward on the contentious University Beach development.

From where this independent scorekeeper sits, it's as if the elected body — save for the two council members who voted against the creation of the University Beach Improvement District Monday night — is being led along by a contractual chain like a terrified circus elephant.

Holding the steel leash are the Texas-based developers who appear to have already gotten exactly what they wanted: the city over a legal barrel, every dime of the elected leadership's political capital and, most importantly, their signatures on the dotted line.

Indeed, some may remember my ramblings in February on the eve of the City Council vote to enter the public-private partnership agreement with University Beach, LLC, for a project developers and supporters expect to bring in $350 million in private investment to Northport.

Most agreed with my skepticism at the time, apart from a few politically comprised elected officials and the small cadre of sycophants in their ears whose reasons for supporting the project became clear when examining what they stood to gain financially from such a project.

Just on paper, this massive hypothetical is the single-largest economic development project in the city's history and immediately raised red flags among those living in the quiet, sparsely populated area that's in question.

As Patch reported on Monday, the latest development for University Beach saw a split City Council vote 3-2 in favor of the creation of a University Beach Improvement District that the developers' legal counsel said would now be used to assess and shop out the property.

District 4's Jamie Dykes and District 5's Anwar Aiken were the two votes against the creation of the University Beach Improvement District.

“I still have a lot of questions that have gone unanswered," Dykes told me following Monday night's meeting. "And I have concerns about every aspect of this development based on the past history of one of the developers related to a project in Texas. At this point, I don’t believe there’s any turning back without bankrupting our city. And I don’t think anyone wants that. I can only hope the outcome is different than that of Rowlett.”

Questions are indeed plentiful, even several months removed from the concept first being rolled out to a surprised public in the form of a public notice printed only in the Tuscaloosa News and receiving little fanfare otherwise.

And we're still no closer to clarity today than we were on the cold and rainy February day when I learned about the proposal from a classified in a print newspaper I had to pay money for.

Questions have since been raised along the way, such as concerns over developer Kent Donahue's connection to the highly controversial Sapphire Bay development in Rowlett, Texas — as previously mentioned by Dykes — and were still lingering unanswered Monday night as residents renewed their calls for transparency and accountability for how the city got to this point.

After all, when looking back to the genesis of this controversy, all it took was a quick change of the procedural rules for the Council that February night to avoid a mandated unanimous vote to enter the project agreement by simple majority.

Dykes ended up the lone vote against a deal that evening that the city is likely to regret for years to come and one that is sure to pose a serious threat to the political careers of many in City Hall with a municipal election coming up next August.

For example: The Council Chamber in City Hall erupted with laughter and jeers when attorney John Ray, who represents the city on the University Beach deal, conceded under questioning from Dykes that the structure of the Improvement District approved minutes later by the Council allowed for the University Beach Improvement District to forcibly annex contiguous property if its developers feel led to do so.

It was the bombshell of the evening.

While trying to downplay the authority the city was about to grant the out-of-town developers, Ray also said Alabama Code allows for the district to do everything from build schools to manage roads in their footprint, regardless of the size.

Still, Ray was quick to insist that this kind of build-out was not what the City of Northport was contracting with the developer to do. What he conveniently left out, however, is what happens when the developers move forward on any of the aforementioned measures without seeking prior approval from the Northport City Council.

"There's no doubt that the power given to improvement districts is broad," Ray said, relenting to the possibility of the University Beach Improvement District being able to forcibly annex land or build out its own public services without city approval. "It's spelled out in the (Alabama) code."

In defense of the concept, University Beach's legal counsel on hand Monday night said Improvement Districts are becoming increasingly common for the economic development sector in Alabama because they are used as a tool for public-private partnerships.

The attorney also insisted that this would allow the developers to sell tax-exempt bonds at market for the project at a lower figure than would be possible through a bank.

I.E. ... this concept allows for the Improvement District to cut through a whole hell of a lot of red tape that would otherwise hamper a municipality from doing the same thing.

It's worth pointing out here that District 5 Councilman Anwar Aiken, the other nay vote Monday night, is in the first months of an appointed term where he is filling out the unexpired term of former City Council President Jeff Hogg — far and away the loudest advocate on the Council for the resort concept, who resigned amid the public backlash after the city first entered into the public-private partnership agreement in February under the influence of Hogg's staunch advocacy.

Despite the residual effects of Hogg's control still lingering over the council in lieu of his presence, Aiken has been willing to fill that void by listening to his inherited constituents and, at several turns, has expressed a high degree of skepticism regarding the promises being made by University Beach developers.

In terms of the approach displayed by Aiken, it stands as the polar opposite of the tact taken by his authoritarian predecessor, who took much, if not all, of the public credit for the proposed development, despite the developers telling Patch that they had been the ones to approach city leadership.

As I previously reported, one of those same developers in an interview with Patch lamented Hogg's ham-fisted execution of selling the narrative to a skeptical public.

Nevertheless, and whether it's the truth or scapegoating, if you ask those closest to the situation about how the Council ultimately came to quickly support such a questionable measure back at the beginning of February, the fingers will all squarely point back at the disgraced former city councilman.

Since his resignation, the mood inside City Hall has been one that seems more concerned with not breaching the agreed-upon contract as opposed to finding any kind of solution for Northport to get out of such a Faustian deal — the terms of which appear to now be dictating each move forward for those in elected office or otherwise who have yet to publicly question the development.

For example, I was left stunned Monday night by the appointment of the three individuals to the University Beach Improvement District's Board of Directors.

I had already written over the weekend about the measure and named those being considered for appointment but those in attendance Monday night who hadn't read my coverage were not given such a courtesy by our public officials. The names were in the agenda packet, sure, but even a hired geek such as myself barely looks at those and was a bit surprised to receive the emailed agenda last Friday instead of its normal published date of the Wednesday before the upcoming regular meeting.

But to my original point, not once during Monday's Council meeting — and I paid careful attention to it, for the sake of transparency — were any one of those three names mentioned publicly for the Board of Directors for the newly created Improvement District.

I'm sure city leaders will chalk this up to a mere formality but this deviates dramatically from how its other board appointments are handled ... from the Planning & Zoning Commission on down to the Tuscaloosa Public Library Board.

Experience has taught me that the public always gets an appointee's name. That is, unless that name could be a point of contention for those doing the appointing ...

And how would you, the busy reader, ever know who these people are, anyway?

It certainly wouldn't be because their names were mentioned by public officials for the sake of transparency during the meeting to consider their appointments — never mind the appointments were Kent Donahue and John Hughes, the two primary developers for the project, and investor Katie Le of San Marcos, California.

The three were represented by their legal counsel Monday night and were not in attendance.

This stands out as another gripe of this lifelong Northport native and many others: Despite the boiling over of emotions for such a contentious development, those behind the project have only met with city leaders and only addressed the council.

Not one time have these individuals behind the project attended any of the innumerable public interest meetings where citizens have asked straightforward questions about the massive development. Indeed, I sat for over an hour inside the gymnasium at Northport Intermediate School as District 5 Councilman Anwar Aiken fielded questions from red-faced attendees and apologized profusely for Kent Donahue's absence.

ALSO READ: University Beach Development Takes Center Stage At Northport Town Hall Event

For this reporter, I did have the pleasure of being granted an extensive sit-down meeting with developer John Hughes the day the city voted to enter the project agreement.

Hughes seemed to be a man with a vision and was sincere in his pitch when considering that he is a businessman — not someone elected to do what's right for the people who put him into office.

So, with that established, the developers get something of a pass when it comes to how I view their role in this.

Still, my biggest takeaway from that meeting was that he didn't want the concept to be referred to as a "water park" — a term exclusively used by city officials and the University Beach legal counsel, alike, Monday night.

This would be easier to write off as nothing more than the simplest nomenclature available to describe the monstrous development but, considering the vision offered firsthand by one of its key developers, one can't help but wonder how things are continually changing with the concept.

ALSO READ: 'It's Not A Water Park': Developer Discusses Proposed $350M Lagoon Concept For Northport

While the nay votes on Monday night certainly did not go unnoticed by those against the proposed resort, they did little to stop the inevitable. This surely wasn't lost on Dykes and Aiken, who understand the legal ramifications if the city breaches any part of the contract its elected leaders have already entered into.

First-term Mayor John Hinton also opted against wielding the office's seldom-used veto power to delay the creation of the University Beach Improvement District — something he promised he would exercise if the selling of the Northport Community Center property moved forward right after he took office in 2023.

The point in bringing this up is that, whether they would ever admit it to the public or not, our elected leaders know full well they signed a deal with the devil that will not be easy to get out of without the city losing out financially and elected leaders seeing their reputations go up in flames.

“We should have been given studies by Mr. Donahue that gave a prospective income ratio for the city, an environmental study, a traffic study and a feasibility study,” Dykes told Patch.

This is what Northport resident Tuffy Holland has been fighting tooth and nail for, so much so that he is the plaintiff in a civil lawsuit against the city demanding such records.

To Holland's credit and thanks to his dogged persistence, what I learned is that the city is likely telling the truth when it insists that it has honored all of his requests — that is, all of the requests that they are capable of honoring.

As this reporter has learned about public records laws in Alabama over a long career, if one requests a public document that doesn't exist or that the governing body does not possess for whatever reason, then there is no obligation for them to provide said document or say that they are not in possession of it.

Simply put, they don't have to honor a request or provide reasons for not providing a public record they do not possess.

This is telling for the fact that, true to the core of Holland's argument before he filed the lawsuit, there appears to have been no feasibility studies conducted to date by the city relative to a specific development that the Council rushed headlong into in February with barely a week of notice given to the public.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is also involved at this point, although it remains unclear if they will be the White Knight so many may be banking on to potentially raise credible reasons for the deal to be terminated.

Indeed, a public notice issued by the Corps of Engineers says the University Beach developers have petitioned the agency for clearance to discharge fill material into 12.42 acres of forested wetlands, along with smaller parcels of non-forested wetlands and streams in the area of Mill Creek.

The public notice says University Beach LLC's initial construction plan was re-evaluated and modified to "minimize impacts" to nearby waterways, including changing the building and parking lot layout, incorporating a bottomless culvert and realigning internal roads.

What's more, University Beach developers have proposed the use of stream and wetland credits from an approved mitigation bank to allow for approved discharge — meaning, in theory, they could be allowed to pollute local waterways so long as they purchase offset credits.

What's this got to do with the price of rice, though? It's worth mentioning because what I'm left with is a single question and maybe there's something I'm missing here that our elected officials or the developer could clear up ...

These environmental measures were proposed to a federal agency for the sake of oversight, so when were these plans going to be presented to the public, apart from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers just now asking for public feedback?

Keep in mind, dear reader, that this opportunity for public comment is coming from the federal government and more than half a year after the city entered into the project agreement.

So, where's City Hall been in the interim?

Certainly not offering such a platform for the public, this reporter can tell you that much.

To restate my previously established fears as a lifelong Northport native, I can't get past my worry that the developers knew all along this project would never get off the ground and baited our gullible small-town officials into signing a deal they didn't realize they wouldn't be able to get out of without sacrificing a pound or more of flesh.

Instead, the scheme seems to now be locked in and dependent on forcing the city to blink, get cold feet and terminate the deal — regardless of what it will cost City Hall and the taxpayers in legal fees and the inevitable settlement the developers are likely holding out for.

It's a possibility that is even more likely to come to pass if there's impactful turnover on the City Council in the 2025 municipal election.

I can't help but be left pondering something Northport resident Tuffy Holland told the Council Monday during his allotted speaking time when he invoked the name of local developer Ron Turner and others when discussing how the city normally does business.

He did this by saying the ongoing situation with University Beach and its Texas-based developers was a stark departure from the typical garden variety drama on display in Northport politics.

And I think this best sums up Holland's rationale:

"It's better to dance with the devil you know than the one you don't."

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 ryan.phillips@patch.com.