Miss. developers' murky past includes fraud

While the company won't discuss the Kerns' past projects, it is happy to talk about its ambitious current plans for Hancock County. Kurlander said there are 14 separate projects, from luxury condos to commercial space. She said the firm plans to break ground as soon as the court case is settled -- or perhaps even before -- on The Breezes, a 983-unit condo project valued by the company at $750 million; the Shoppes at Paradise Bay, a 10-acre retail-commercial project in nearby Bay St. Louis; and a 160-unit apartment project that is the prototype for nearly 2,000 more rental units in a complex valued at $40 million.

In the next few years, Paradise Properties says it also will develop hundreds of single-family homes, 500 of them around a Robert Trent Jones II-designed golf course; a “five-star” casino-marina project with another 2,700 hotel and condo units, valued at $2.5 billion; and a second hotel-casino project with another 1,500 units, valued at $1.5 billion.

Those numbers dwarf Hancock County’s pre-Katrina property tax rolls, which totaled about $450 million, according to county attorney Gex, who said county supervisors approved the zoning change in the area hoping to provide an economic “shot in the arm.” Gex said that if just $500 million worth of property value is eventually added to tax rolls, it would provide $7.5 million a year in new revenue, approaching one-fourth of the county’s annual budget.

“The Mississippi Gulf Coast is going to become a world-class destination,” said Kurlander, adding that pre-construction sales for the Breezes condo project have been brisk, with the first of four buildings in the 983-unit project already sold out.

Chief sales agent for the project, Robin Sherman of JME Coldwell Banker in Pensacola, Fla., said prices, which she expects to increase as construction nears, range from $475,000 to $800,000. Buyers are paying 10 percent non-refundable down payments to enter into contracts, Sherman said.

The Kern brothers said one of their key goals is to help provide new homes and tax revenue for the hurricane-ravaged area and they hope their association with the project doesn’t taint it.

“If your organization is going to try to destroy the project based on my record, I’ll be happy to resign from the company,” said Richard Kern, who acknowledged that financing has yet to be secured for Paradise Bay. “If you think I’m a bad person, that’s up to you. I don’t think I am and everybody who knows me doesn’t think I am.”

Jim Seida / MSNBC.com Work is under way on a new casino near the site of some of Paradise Property Group's planned projects at Bayou Caddy in Hancock County, Miss.

Added Donald Kern: “I have been working day and night to try and get this thing accomplished and I’d hate to have an old skeleton come out and get me fired.”

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