Gulf Shores - Courts Favor Condos

Published By Mobile Press Register

The Alabama Court of Civil Appeals has upheld a lower court's decision to prevent two Fort Morgan residents from challenging the validity of plans for an oft-litigated-against high-rise condominium proposal.
The ruling gets the Gulf Highlands project -- which was originally pitched in 1997 as a 400-unit surfside subdivision and later morphed into a 500-unit high-rise project -- past one of its legal battles. But the project still faces a separate federal court challenge related to the endangered Alabama beach mouse.
In early 2005, Fort Morgan residents Tom Hodges and Robert Adair Jr. asked the Baldwin County Board of Zoning Adjustment for District 25, which oversees the Fort Morgan peninsula, to re-examine whether the County Commission's approval of plans for Gulf Highlands had expired.

Specifically the two men questioned whether a swap of 10-acre parcels between Gulf Highlands Development LLC and the developers of a neighboring condo project, Beach Club West, two years earlier triggered an extension of the designs' expiration date. The swap was aimed at allowing the Beach Club West developers, the Head Companies, to get out of a separate lawsuit that challenged whether they had enough connected land to build 473 condos they had planned.
County officials and Gulf Highlands' developers argued that the change in property boundaries constituted enough of an alteration to restart the two-year period developers have between approval and the start of construction.
To prevent the appeal to the county zoning board, Gulf Highlands Development and Merrill Land Co., a Pensacola-based firm that has an agreement to purchase the project, sued Hodges, Adair and the Fort Morgan area Board of Adjustment.
The developer's lawyer, Daniel Blackburn, said in an affidavit that members of the board had protested against the project in public forums and should not be able to hear the appeal. Nor, Blackburn argued, was a letter from a county planner that verified the renewed time period something that could be appealed.
Presiding Baldwin County Circuit Judge James Reid ruled in favor of the developers early last year, granting a permanent injunction that prevented the board from considering the residents' appeal. Hodges and Adair then challenged Reid's ruling to the higher court.
In a nine-page decision released earlier this month, Civil Appeals Judge Tommy E. Bryan sided with Reid, finding that the county planner's verification letter was not an administrative act that could be appealed to the Board of Adjustments.
Adair wrote in an e-mail to the Press-Register last week that he was "very disappointed" in the appellate court's ruling. He wrote that he was "in current discussions with the appropriate parties" as to what his next move might be in the fight against the four-tower development.
Blackburn, in an interview, said that while the ruling clears one of Gulf Highlands' legal hurdles, there is no certainty as to when and how the property will develop because it is still tied up in the federal beach mouse litigation.
Merrill Land Co., which built Crystal Shores and Crystal Shores West in Gulf Shores, still has an agreement to buy the Gulf Highlands project, Blackburn said.
And because of a change in county policy that occurred after the challenge of Hodges and Adair, the two-year time limit to start construction on the condos will not begin until the development has cleared all of its legal challenges, Blackburn said.