By: Robin Ford Wallace

Staff Reporter

The golf course at the Canyon Ridge/Tauqueta Falls development atop Lookout Mountain, advertised as due for foreclosure on Tuesday, is to be spared – at least for now.

“I am pleased and relieved to announce an agreement was reached with Zions Bank today to retire the debt and cancel the foreclosure sale of the golf course,” reads a July 21 email from developer Randy Banker shared with the Sentinel by Dade Water Authority Manager Doug Anderton.

“While this does not satisfy all of the issues regarding the financial health of the Club, it certainly settles one of the more difficult.”

The fate of the golf course and of the Canyon Ridge/Tauqueta Falls luxury housing community surrounding it, though most of the development lies in Walker County, is of intimate interest to Dade because of a privately built and operated wastewater treatment plant there.

Anderton, with the consent of the then-board of directors for the Dade Water Authority, agreed in 2002 that the Authority would accept responsibility for operating the plant should the developer fail.

Such a failure began to seem less remote in recent months as foreclosure notices appeared in this newspaper’s legals section for properties at the development. The latest, as reported in last week’s Sentinel, was for the golf course itself, listing a $1.5 million debt to Zions First National Bank.

The Sentinel called Zions for confirmation that the foreclosure had been postponed.

The Sentinel’s phone call was referred to and returned by Deane Brunson, an attorney with Griffin, Brunson and Wood of Charlotte, N.C., who reported that his client, whom he declined to name, had obtained the Zions debt and had in fact agreed not to foreclose. “We have acquired the note and we intend to postpone the sale,” he said.

Brunson said his client had taken over the debt in consideration of a public/private tourism initiative by Walker County. “We do support Walker County in hopes of getting the bonds issued and a hotel built on the site,” he said.

He referred to a plan previously discussed in this newspaper whereby the developer would sell bonds to finance a hotel. The bonds, as described in April by Walker County Coordinator David Ashburn, would be guaranteed with public funds by Walker County.  “It’s like a cosigner on a note,” he said then.

But contacted Monday for comment for this article, Ashburn disavowed the hotel plan rather emphatically, saying that “the people we dealt with originally” on the project had backed down and that Randy Baker was pursuing the bond issuance idea independently.

“Walker County is doing nothing at this time,” he said.

The agreement between Dade Water Authority and Canyon Ridge, approved by the Georgia Environmental Protection Division in 2003, was explained by Doug Anderton as a natural outgrowth of the fact that the Authority supplies water to that part of Lookout Mountain despite its geopolitical position within Walker County.

But the Dade County Commission, Dade’s governing body, insisted it had known nothing of the agreement until sometime in 2009. The issue figured in the Commission’s move earlier this year to bring the Authority under its own supervision via locally requested state legislation that restructured its board of directors

At July’s water board meeting, plans were discussed to have the sewer plant and Dade’s water infrastructure in the other county absorbed by Walker.