New movement in long-stalled ACR project
by Dan McClelland
There is new movement on the long-stalled Adirondack Club and Resort project.
Last month the holders of the mortgage on the 5,800 acres of Oval Wood Dish Corp. Liquidating Trust lands on the east end of Lake Simond foreclosed on Preserve Associates, the company that had intended to sell 18 large great camp lots as part of the Adirondack Club and Resort.
The legal maneuver was initiated by a limited liability company called Crossroads ADK to sell the parcel at public auction where it or an affiliated group would be the successful bidder.
Stanley Hutton Rumbough is the principle of Crossroads and Michael P. McNally, is key member of the management team who along with their wives, purchased the former Ginsberg's Department store building several years ago and dramatically renovated it.
Mr. McNally has been very active in the community in recent years, working alongside his wife, Louise, who founded Tupper Arts here over a year ago and which has enjoyed amazing success.
Stanley Rumbough, the grandson of cereal heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post who owned Camp Topridge on Upper St. Regis lake, spent his summers there as a boy. He is known for his generosity and philanthropic gifts to many worthwhile causes. including those entities in Tupper Lake.
He and Mr. McNally met 45 years ago when Rumbough was a Lt. in the Marines and stationed at MCAS EL Toro and Mr. McNally was a corporate pilot. Mr. Rumbough is also a licensed glider pilot.
“It's a way to untangle a web of debt on that large parcel,” Mr. McNally, the managing partner in Crossroads Preserve told the Free Press Monday.
The land on which the Adirondack Club and Resort partners dreamed of subdividing into large farm-sized lots where great camps would someday be built was sold to Preserve Associates in May, 2017 by the heirs of the Hull family founders of the Oval Wood Dish Corp. whose gigantic manufacturing site on Demars Blvd was a major employer here for much of the last century.
Preserve Associates is one of four companies that are the landowners of the various pieces of the ACR project which included Big Tupper, Cranberry Pond and a marina on Tupper Lake.
In the original ACR plan, the sale of 18 great camp lots, the largest of which is about 1,200 acres in size, was expected to raise $50 million or more in revenues- a percentage of which (7.25%)was going to be used to rehabilitate, and modernize the Big Tupper Ski Center.
Preserve Associates LLC, whose principals include Michael Foxman and Tom Lawson, apparently failed to make any payments to the Oval Wood Dish trust on the $5.15 million mortgage and didn't meet other obligations of the financial document including the maintenance of insurance coverage and payment of land taxes.
In October the trust sold the mortgage to Crossroads ADK, which last month started the foreclosure action against Preserve Associates, in the face of no payments and the other mortgage conditions not met.
In it’s foreclosure filing, Crossroads named everyone with liens on the property, including law firms, architects, engineers and another llc created by Mr. Rumbough and Mr. McNally. This is a legal requirement when anyone forecloses on a mortgage that is in default..
“It was a way to get the project going again, because as things now stand it was and is at a standstill.” said Mr. McNally. “We're just trying to clean things up and move forward.”
He explained that the project is currently “drowning in mountains of debt” and in such a state it would never be attractive to a new developer and potential investors.
Rumbough and McNally would like to attract a developer/investment group with a successful track record in large scale projects to do the entire project and might even consider “partnering” with that developer/investor. “We believe the ACR is a great project”.
Their goal, he said, is to simplify the very complicated financial situation that now surrounds the project and move things forward.
Mr. McNally emphasized, however, that the foreclosure action currently in the courts has nothing to do with re-opening the Big Tupper Ski Center on Mt. Morris.
“We would all like to see that happen, but that is down the road.”
Asked to predict the future of the entire project, he said candidly: “there's definitely still hope.”
This foreclosure action is an attempt to save the project, not destroy it.
He also emphasized that negotiations with Mike Foxman and his partners started last fall and are still ongoing. “We're hoping they will sell to us, but right now we're at an impasse unfortunately.”
As a result of that impasse in the negotiations, the foreclosure action was necessary.
In an investigative piece by Jim Odato that was published in the Adirondack Explorer in recent weeks Simos C. Dimas, a Manhattan attorney representing Crossroads ADK said the goal is to bring the project through to fruition using a third-party developer. “This in an attempt to save the project, not destroy it!” he was quoted as saying.
Mr. Dimas said Mr. Rumbough and his partners have been studying the project for months after he invested millions of dollars on improvements to the project site and facilities. He told the regional magazine-style publication the foreclosure action is a remedy to gain control of the property “so that work on the project can finally begin and jobs can start to be created.”
In that same article, Nancy Hull Godshall, a trustee in the Oval Wood Dish Corp. Liquidating Trust was quoted as saying her group is encouraged and optimistic by the latest developments.
“Our family has long ties to this community and we care deeply about the future of the Adirondack Club and Resort” and Tupper Lake in particular. “The trust sold the mortgage with the community's interests at heart, firmly believing the buyer (Crossroads ADK) has the incentive, capital and ability to move the project forward, and understanding that the buyer has already made very significant investments in the project.”