Mayor Howard Burrell, who will present it to the Township Council for approval Tuesday, said the township has already received hundreds of thousands of dollars in past due property taxes and is betting the house's money the agreement can resurrect the late Hugh Hefner's once-palatial resort from mothballs into something that can again be a revenue generator for the township.
Legends, the now-shuttered former Playboy Club that hosted sold-out performances by Frank Sinatra, Liza Minnelli, Sammy Davis Jr. and other big-time entertainers in its heyday, may be on the verge of a second act under terms of a proposed legal settlement with the township.
Mayor Howard Burrell, who will present it to the Township Council for approval Tuesday, said the township has already received hundreds of thousands of dollars in past due property taxes and is betting the house's money the agreement can resurrect the late Hugh Hefner's once-palatial resort from mothballs into something that can again be a revenue generator for the township.
The linchpin of the proposal is the agreement by Metairie Corp., the facility's current owner, to make good on $860,000 in delinquent property taxes due to Vernon. Of that amount, $472,000 was paid at the end of last month with the balance due by June 30, 2021, Burrell said.
Metairie would also be required to find a buyer or obtain financing for the redevelopment of the property, located at the junction of Route 94 and Route 517, by June 30 or find an auctioneer to sell it off by October.
Vernon, in turn, would forgive about $60,000 in building and fire code violations and drop its opposition to renewing the resort's cabaret liquor license, a major consideration for any investor.
"The assumption is that anyone who buys this will know what the situation is and have some plan to make it useful," Burrell said. "I can't see somebody paying a lot of money for it without a plan."
Vernon residents have heard this song before, from proposals to turn it into a convention center or satellite college campus and again two years ago when a hedge fund investor claimed to be finalizing a deal to turn it into a retirement community. All came to naught.
But with the new Legoland theme park set to open next year in Goshen, N.Y., Burrell said the time is right for Vernon and its resorts to cash in on an expected spillover of tourism and demand for hotel rooms across the region. He believes this spillover will be key to resurrecting the resort.
Built at a cost of nearly $30 million, the Great Gorge Playboy Club had eight floors and over 800 guest rooms as well as a penthouse suite famously reserved for Hefner himself when it opened in 1971. The resort had a cabaret, ballroom, 27-championship hole golf course, bowling, tennis, jacuzzis, indoor swimming pools and an Olympic-sized outdoor pool plus access to nearby skiing and riding. These amenities, coupled with its nightly entertainment and ubiquitous Playboy Bunnies, enabled the club to flourish in its first few years.
Things started to go south once the novelty wore off and hopes for the legalization of casino gambling at the hotel were dashed. In 1982, the facility was sold to the Americana hotel chain and later was resold and rebranded as Seasons.
Many of the units were subsequently converted to timeshares and condominiums. In 1998, the remaining units and building were rebranded as Legends Resort & Country Club and acquired by Hillel Meyers, a Florida-based timeshare industry executive whose Metairie Corp. remains the facility's primary owner today.
Much of the building has since been shuttered and the unused units leased to short-term tenants including a Tennessee Gas pipeline worker from out of state who was murdered at the hotel in 2008. With reports of drug dealing and vultures, bats and other vermin taking up residence in the building, Vernon took steps to have the remaining 60 or so low-income tenants evicted three years ago for health and safety reasons.
Burrell is hopeful the removal of legal and tax encumbrances will make the former hotel more palatable to an investor. However, he acknowledged the sale could be complicated by the multiple unit owners and more than 2,200 people who bought timeshares here in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Some are believed to still hold title to those units.
"All of the people who still own condos are unknown and probably unknowable to a great extent," Burrell said. "For us, the important thing is that all of the taxes and anything else that's financially due Vernon will have to come off the top, so it's going to be up to the new owner to deal with those people. He'll have to do that."
Although the township could seek to condemn the facility through eminent domain, Burrell said it would do nothing to put it back on the tax rolls. Additionally, the township doesn't want to be in the hotel business or left to shoulder the $1 million in annual carrying costs to keep its infrastructure from deteriorating, let alone the $15 million or more it may take to refurbish it.
Burrell said the settlement will be a win-win if it leads an investor to come forward and restore the facility to the tax rolls.
Source: https://www.njherald.com/story/news/2020/12/23/playboy-club-redevelopment-nixed-vernon/4006323001/?fbclid=IwAR25KPS7Oq20fACsbe9dnqC2miAnRyeqZt2y3oZl4vgBRcR0EwAXTdadea0