By: Robin Ford Wallace, Reporter

Ordinary business at Friday’s meeting of the Dade County Water Authority’s board of directors was swept to the wayside as Frank Brock, the former president of Covenant College who is now spearheading the move to build an associated assisted-living and active-adult housing development near the college, took the floor to propose a deal to County Executive Ted Rumley and the water board members: Buy our sewage system.

“There would be no cost to Dade County, but when it’s all said and done we would need to be able to turn it over to Dade County for the future maintenance of it,” said Brock.

Brock was speaking on behalf of the nonprofit AALC, or Active Adult Living Community, that he and associates formed in 2008 for the purpose of building a senior housing development to be called Brow Wood on Lookout Mountain. 

Under the plan Brock proposed, Brow Wood’s sewer system would be privately built and paid for; then Dade would assume the cost of its construction when it took the system over, financing it through bonds to be issued by the Water Authority. 

But the debt service, or payments, on those bonds, said Brock and developer Duane Horton of GenTech, who accompanied Brock at the presentation, would be more than covered by sewerage revenues from the system – which as an important part of the deal would be augmented by sewage business from Covenant itself. 

“That’s the real anchor of this whole thing, is the Covenant College part of it,” said Brock.

Brock began his presentation by describing his abiding ambition to build such a community on the mountain. “It’s really a lifelong thing for me,” he said. “There’s just nothing in the nine-ZIP-code area around here for assisted living.”

An earlier avatar of Brock’s dream, Chapelbrow, failed in 2009 when the town of Lookout Mountain, Ga., rejected the notion of such a development within its city limits, Brock recounted.   

Now, he said, the project had been relocated to a 150-acre tract of brow acreage in Dade County owned by the Wheland family. “Of course, we all know Dade County is a great place to build because of the whole way of government and the way it works,” he said. 

Brock said he had asked to address the water board without an appointment because the option AALC had purchased on the Wheland land expired that day – Friday – and now he and his associates had only 30 days to finalize the purchase.  “If we can’t close, the whole thing falls apart,” he said. 

Brow Wood, said Brock, is not to be a retirement facility but an active adult community in which individual homeowners will own their houses outright; but also included in the plan is a health care component. “The whole thing is designed on living as long as you can in your own house, but when you need it you need it,” he said of the assisted living element.

Brow Wood homeowners would be given preference for admission to the assisted living facility, he said. 

Brock said that AALC had secured all the other pieces necessary for the Brow Wood project, including $1.9 million in lot sales from buyers who had been willing to plunk down 50 percent cash up front.  All that was missing, he said, was a decision about the development’s sanitary arrangements.

Originally, said Brock, Brow Wood was designed to have an independent package sewage system, and that was the option it would revert to should Dade nix this offer.

Under the Dade plan, Brow Wood’s sewage would be piped down the mountain through a gravity system to an existing but currently underused pumping station on Highway 11 at Wildwood. CTI engineer Ron Key, also attending the presentation, demonstrated the route.

Both Brock and contractor Horton said it was a given in the deal that Dade would incur no costs, but as they were questioned by County Attorney Robin Rogers and water board member Dennis Watson, also an attorney, it emerged that it was more a matter of no up-front costs: Dade would with the assumption of responsibility for the system also assume the price tag for building it, offsetting bond payments for that price tag with the revenues the system generated – and presumably coming out firmly in the black as a result of the established Covenant sewage business.

But Watson in particular questioned how that would work. Covenant currently sends its sewage, and sewage dollars, to the city of Lookout Mountain, Ga., which recently constructed a state-of-the-art sewer of its own. Were there no contractual obligations to that relationship?

Well, yes and no, said Brock as well as the Covenant officials who accompanied him at the meeting, Troy Duble and Corey Dupree. They described the college’s relationship with the town as a troubled one, sewage-wise, and weren’t sure if Lookout Mountain, Ga., would miss them much.  “We’re sort of the redheaded stepchild for the city of Lookout Mountain,” said Brock. “Everything that happens to their system, we get blamed for at Covenant College.”

Duble, who is vice president for advancement at Covenant, said it might not be a matter so much of terminating the contract with Lookout Mountain as of diverting most of the college’s sewage flow to Dade to assure its revenue covered bond debt service for Brow Wood. “There’s all kinds of room in there,” he said of the contract.

Watson questioned how much room would be in a similar arrangement between Dade and the college. “I want more assurance than I’ve heard today that the Covenant piece can be enforceable and we can count on it,” he said.

Frank Brock said he realized nothing could be decided today. “We want a nod, not a vote,” he told the board.

Whether he got that nod is anyone’s guess. Interviewed following the meeting, Chairman Rumley seemed uncharacteristically ambivalent. He said that if it performed as billed, the Covenant deal could be an enormous financial boom to the county. And he also said that an assisted living facility could certainly benefit Dade’s aging population – but he added that at $150,000 for a building lot, Brow Wood was out of reach for the average Dade citizen.

Finally, it had not escaped the county executive’s attention that GenTech’s Duane Horton, the contractor for this project, was also to have been the developer of a proposed tourism-enhancing initiative in neighboring Walker County, a hotel at the Canyon Ridge golf community to be paid for by bonds guaranteed with taxpayer money. When that issue came up in 2010, Rumley went on the record as firmly opposed to bonding arrangements that commingled public funds with private development.

Also, Rumley as well as other Dade commissioners registered outrage last year when they discovered a deal the Water Authority had made with Canyon Ridge developer Randy Banker to assume responsibility for the golf course’s privately built wastewater treatment plant should the developer fail– a consummation that on June 1 came to pass.

In any case, said Rumley, Brock and crew must produce more information before Dade acts on the project.  “What I heard today was mostly talk,” he said.

Frank Brock says he wants to start construction this summer, while the weather is dry, with prospective residents beginning to build in January. But Rumley said that the water board could not discuss the proposed deal together except at open meetings, so he did not expect the issue to come up until next month unless Brock requested a special called meeting.