The site of a World War II–era bombing and gunnery range in Tangipahoa Parish is at the center of a lawsuit filed last week in U.S. District Court in New Orleans. The suit against the federal government has been filed by a group of developers who tried to build a subdivision on the property several years ago—only to learn after spending millions of dollars on the project that the property could contain unexploded ordnance and munitions.
The suit is just the latest chapter in a long-running legal battle involving MGD Partners, the developers of the whimsically named Coves of the Highland subdivision, and is one of the more unusual and interesting examples of what can go wrong in a complicated land deal.
“I’ve lived here my whole life and been involved in real estate for years,” says Carson Davis, one of the project developers and plaintiffs in the lawsuit. “This is the strangest thing I’ve ever seen.”
Davis grew up in Hammond and remembers his grandfather telling him about the old World War II bombing range, which was north of the town. In fact, a lot of people in the area knew vaguely about it, but nothing demarcated the exact boundaries of the site. And for some unknown reason, there was never a recorded lease between the federal government, which used the site from 1942 through 1945, and the owners of the property.
That’s why when Davis and his partners decided to develop the Coves in 2006—at the height of the post-Katrina population surge along the Interstate 12 corridor—they were unaware that part of the 324-acre site was within the boundaries of the old gunnery range. According to the lawsuit, the information didn’t turn up in a title search.
MGD, whose partners include Davis, John Mills and Julius Guttierez, didn’t have any trouble securing financing.
They created a development district in 2006, which issued more than $7.6 million in bonds. They secured an additional $2 million in bank financing, and by early 2009 had completed all the road and infrastructure work. They had also laid out 264 home lots in the first 81-acre parcel of the property, lined up local builders and were pre-selling lots.
“We had already made the investment,” Davis says. “I had gotten to the point where I had pre-sold about $2.5 million in lots.”
Then in March 2009 the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers placed a public notice in the Hammond Star requesting information about the former Hammond Bombing and Gunnery Range. The notice also referenced a draft of a site inspection report that the corps had placed in the Hammond library in late 2008, suggesting the range could contain unexploded ordnance, including 100-pound bombs, practice rockets and machine gun ammunition.
“I called our engineer and said, ‘Bill, you better get over to the library,'” Davis recalls. “We saw the map, and that was the first time we realized our property was within the boundaries of the bombing range.”
By late April, the Tangipahoa Parish Engineer notified MGD it would not issue any more permits or approvals until the risk of unexploded ordnance contamination had been fully investigated and remediated. According to the lawsuit, “This caused the plaintiffs to default on $10 million in debt and plaintiffs did not have the financial resources to cause the remediation.” What’s more, the suit contends, “the fact of a history of use of the property as a bombing range created a stigma on the project adversely affecting the ability to sell the residential lots to the public.”
In the four years since, MGD has been involved in a flurry of lawsuits that the plaintiffs’ own attorney, Jim Williford, says have named just about “everyone involved with this project.” MGD was sued for defaulting on contracts and loans. In return, MGD has sued attorneys involved in the original land transaction, the abstractor who did the title search—though he has since died—and even the federal government. Why, the suit against the federal government asks, was the existence of the range kept so quiet, and why did it take 70 years to look into cleaning it up?
“What’s really galling is that the same representatives from the Corps of Engineers office who did the wetlands inspections in 2008 at the subdivision were working on the munitions report,” says Williford. “They never said anything about it.”
According to Williford, most of the suits have been settled, though some are still wending their way through the appellate process. MGD has recouped a small amount of the money it lost, he says. But in the meantime, MGD had to spend more than $175,000 doing remediation work at the subdivision site, scouring the property for any signs of munitions. Nothing turned up, and the property has since gotten a clean bill of health.
Now the partners are again suing the federal government—specifically, the Corps of Engineers and the Department of Defense—under an environmental law that, according to the lawsuit, makes the government liable for the cost of the remediation work.
So far, the government has yet to file a response to the lawsuit, and efforts to reach a spokesman with the Corps of Engineers and Department of Defense were unsuccessful. Williford says his clients may be out $10 million but they deserve to be reimbursed for the $175,000 they spent on remediation work. “This should never have happened,” he says. “I just want to get them reimbursed for their expenses.”
As for the Coves development, Davis says MGD is working to bring it back to life.
“It’s a wonderful project,” he says. “It’s really beautiful. It’s the only project in the area. We just need a buyer.”
