The K&D Group’s offer to buy the old Ameritrust complex from the county is unraveling quickly. If you thought it unlikely that a private developer would pay $35 million for a set of long-vacant, asbestos-filled buildings — which happened to have sold for a mere $22 million three years earlier — well, you were right. They won’t.
K&D was the only company that submitted a bid for the complex, but both company and county seemed to be hiding a few critical details. Soon after the bid was accepted, the city started throwing multi-million dollar loans at K&D to subsidize its other downtown projects. It looked suspiciously like payback for covering a huge blunder by county commissioners, who bought the buildings intending to build new headquarters there, only to discover they didn’t have enough money to make it happen…
This article appears in Feb 6-12, 2008.