By: Robin Ford Wallace, Staff Reporter

Shaun Brand of the Dade County Health Department’s Environmental division confirmed last week that he had given up trying to bring Wild Moon Ranch and Resort, formerly known as the Preserve, into compliance with county health rules, opting finally to pass the matter into legal hands.

 “The application process is straightforward. We were guiding them and telling them exactly what information we needed,” said Brand. “We basically were not getting anywhere, and at that point we just turned it over to the county attorney.”

Wild Moon/the Preserve is a development at Johnson’s Crook in Rising Fawn by Marion County (Tenn.)-based Southern Group. Originally conceived as a second-home community, it announced plans this year to rebrand itself as a tourist resort, renting out cabins and sponsoring equestrian events and trail rides.

This spring, Wild Moon hosted a retreat for Volkswagen bigwigs, and on Halloween weekend it hosted a show by “Horse Whisperer” John Lyons that filled its rental cabins to capacity.

But apparently, it shouldn’t have. “Basically, it’s an operation that’s operating without a permit,” said Brand.

At issue is a tourist accommodation permit issued by the Georgia Public Health Department. Suppliers of tourist accommodations are required to apply for the permit well in advance of opening and to maintain it by passing routine inspections of water supply, toilet facilities, sewage disposal, fire safety and so forth. 

An application for the permit states in bold print: “Plans must be submitted fourteen (14) days prior to beginning construction.”  

But Brand says his department had been working with Southern Group patiently, allowing it to continue operations while it went through the process of completing the permit application. “It wasn’t really a hard thing to get done,” he said.

He said that though he’d referred the issue to the county attorney’s office, he still hoped the resort would come into compliance.

County Attorney Robin Rogers confirmed that the matter had been turned over to him in his capacity as attorney for the health department. “It appears that they are in violation of Georgia public health laws,” he said.

Rogers’ function now is to notify the resort by letter that legal action looms if the permit is not obtained, he said; and then, if the matter remains unresolved, to take it before a superior court judge who could then act quickly to shut the facility down if necessary.

Contacted by phone on Monday, Travis Shields, one-third owner of Southern Group with Tommy and Josh Dobson, his father- and brother-in-law, respectively, said office staff at Wild Moon had been working closely with the health department and that he was surprised to hear the process had come to an impasse. “I didn’t know there was a problem,” he said.

He said the day-to-day operations of the resort were the responsibility of his brother-in-law, but the younger Dobson did not return the Sentinel’s telephone calls.

In any case, the health department may be the least of Southern Group’s woes. New liens against unsold lots by Cornerstone Community Bank of Chattanooga recently appeared at the county courthouse, though Shields says these merely represent additional collateral Southern Group is furnishing the lender in order to restructure shaky loans as he described in a previous interview.

In October, it was revealed that Southern Group had sold most of its development lots via a no-money-down, no-monthly-payment plan, bargaining with investors to use their credit to borrow heavily against lot values.  A typical two- to three-acre lot at the Preserve/Wild Moon was valued at $175,000 to $250,000 for loan purposes.

Under “post-closing agreements,” Southern Group returned an amount equal to the loan down payment to individual investors, then undertook to make their monthly mortgage payments and pay their real estate taxes. But this program collapsed this summer when Southern Group stopped making the bank payments. 

As chronicled by The Sentinel, Dade businessman Eugene Johnson, who owns a mortgage on the development, bailed Southern Group out this month by paying the delinquent 2008 real estate taxes, but the supposition that many individual investors, left to make their own loan payments, have failed to do so may be attested to by the burgeoning number of foreclosure notices for the Preserve in this newspaper’s legal section – a dozen by Cornerstone alone in last week’s edition.    

“We’re trying to get them to the point where they don’t actually foreclose,” said Shields of Cornerstone.  “We’re trying to work out a deal where they forebear the foreclosure process, or if they do foreclose, they’ll take hopefully the deed in lieu of foreclosure, or something that releases that person from any future liability.”

But he added that Cornerstone had committed to nothing as yet; and in fact, the bank, contacted for reaction, said through its spokesperson, Charlotte Lindeman, that it required more time to review its policies before commenting.