CEDAR -- Efforts to sell Sugar Loaf Resort continue, but the run-down property won't go to a county tax sale, parties affiliated with the site said.
A Florida-based bank's representative said Friday that more than $100,000 in back taxes on the sprawling resort will be paid to avoid foreclosure by Leelanau County for unpaid property taxes from 2007.
"A cashier's check has already been issued for that," said Leonard Zedeck, an attorney and principal for TransCapital Bank in Florida.
A staff member for the Leelanau County Treasurer's office said no tax payment had been received by Friday afternoon. But Zedeck said the payment "is in the pipeline" and would be submitted well before the March 31 payment deadline.
Meanwhile, former resort owner Remo Polselli distanced himself from any ownership interests at Sugar Loaf, following recent revelations that his wife is a personal guarantor of the resort's mortgage with present owner Kate Wickstrom.
TransCapital Bank in August assigned the resort's mortgage to a Michigan company that lists its managing partner as Hanna Karcho Polselli. Polselli's company then made a collateral assignment to a bank in Southfield for a $750,000 loan.
Polselli said neither he nor his wife have any active involvement in Sugar Loaf, but she retains an ownership interest in the property as a personal guarantor of Wickstrom's mortgage.
Polselli said he turned the property over to a company operated by his wife after he pled guilty in 2003 to a federal tax evasion charge, for which he spent more than a year in prison. The company, known as SL 2002, sold the resort to Wickstrom in 2005 for $5.7 million.
"Her and I are separate people; she has multiple properties throughout the state," Polselli said of his wife. "I don't want people to think Remo's involved -- I'm not involved. But I live with it every night."
Polselli said his wife signed on as a guarantor so TransCapital would approve financing for Wickstrom. Now, Polselli said his wife is making Sugar Loaf's mortgage payments.
"If Hanna was not the guarantor, she'd walk away from this thing," Polselli said. "She's on the hook."
Zedeck said Wickstrom hasn't made a mortgage payment on the resort for almost a year, and that Hanna Polselli ultimately will decide if and when the property is sold.
"It's her corporation's call at this point," Zedeck said.
Leelanau County consultants estimate Sugar Loaf needs close to $40 million in capital investment, according to a December report to the county's Brownfield Redevelopment Authority. An estimated $2.5 million in brownfield incentives could be available, including almost $900,000 for building demolition and more than $100,000 for asbestos removal.
Polselli said the resort could be re-opened for far less than that, and contends the property could be sustained as a ski and snowboarding resort. He said there remain "interested parties" to purchase the resort, recently appraised for around $5 million.
"It can be saved, I really think it can be," he said. "Not try to reinvent it, but make it what it was."
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