05/01/2020 – Trophy Club, TX
Breadwinners restaurant in Trophy Club has closed permanently. It lasted 3 1/2 years.
Breadwinners and the adjacent restaurant, HG Sply Co., were developed by Old Town Development (OTD). Breadwinners was the first to open in November 2016 and was the brainchild of Chris Gordon & Justin Springfield, owners of OTD. It is a project that has been mired in controversy from the very beginning.
The Backstory.
The Town Council created an Economic Development Corporation (EDC) to use funds from various Trophy Club Taxing entities and give it as incentives for development. This included Old Town Development to develop the property at Trophy Wood Drive and 114. Ultimately, OTD would receive $2.4 million dollars of the citizens’ money.
The Agreement between the Town and OTD was written and approved by OTD and the Trophy Club EDC Board, which included Sean Bone and Eric Jensen as Members, both of whom would move from serving on the EDC board to being elected and serving on the Town Council, where they voted to approve a total buyout of the agreement.
Last year, through an investigation by the Town Manager, it was revealed that Councilman Tim Kurtz had invested $100,000 into the OTD project (which he initially denied to the Town Attorney). Kurtz set-up an investment Company (Turnberry Capital LLC) and used his position to solicit investors for the trampoline park. Kurtz was also in a Partnership with one of the two principals of OTD for a Trampoline Park Franchise, all while failing to recuse himself from voting on, and promoting, the OTD projects.
On the day that this all came to head before Town Council, Eric Jensen went to great lengths to defend his friend, Kurtz. At times, it almost felt like he was acting as Kurtz’s attorney with his “Perry Mason” style of cross examination analysis of dates towards the Town Manager. Jensen desperately searched for any technicality to muddy the waters from the truth.
In the middle of this saga, there was an opportunity to save the Town some money. One provision of the Agreement stated that if the property was sold before the entire project was paid out, then the Town would stop payments on the remaining incentives. Furthermore, according to Agreement, the Town must be notified in advance about any impending sale.
Well, it turns out that the property was sold two weeks prior to the Council voting to renew the agreement, which was about to expire before the 2nd restaurant was open. The property was sold on May 30, 2018 and the OTD agreement was renewed on June 12, 2018.
Council Members Eric Jensen, Rhylan Rowe, Tim Kurtz and EDC Member Sean Bone all were aware of the sale, but all failed to notify the Town or the remaining Council Members. Jensen even directly lied to the citizens and made the statement that the property wasn’t sold, it was simply refinanced with a different bank.
Now, we enter an entirely new level of alleged corruption. How could the developer sign a contract for a property that they knowingly no longer own?
Following the “sale” and the fiasco that followed over the investment conflict of interest of Kurtz, the Town Council agreed to amend the OTD agreement, for the third time, in favor of the developer, thus giving them more time to complete the project and open HG Sply Co. and assure the developer would get all their funding.
The Council should not have approved the extension or continued payments, as OTD was in breach of contract … but, they did. Only Councilman Greg Lamont voted against extending the agreement and against continuing the payments to OTD, because the evidence was clear that OTD was in breach of contract for selling the Breadwinners property without notification.
It is particularly distressing that Eric Jensen stated in a meeting that he never read the Agreement. Yet audio recordings from the EDC meeting clearly show that Mr. Jensen not only made the motion to approve the Agreement, but he can also be heard discussing that it would take 20 years before the Town would break even on the project. He specifically stated that the project was less about an ROI and more about an “amenity” that the citizens of Trophy Club would have access to.
Obviously, it is not Eric Jensen, Sean Bone or Rhylan Rowe’s fault that Breadwinners has closed its doors. For that, we must put the blame on poor management, with COVID-19 sealing their fate but, it certainly seems their fault that the Town has lost hundreds of thousands of dollars on this investment.
Finally, it is of interest to the community to know that Chris Gordon has since listed his TC home so that he may take his vast profits and move to his new beach home in Florida.
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Downloads:
Contract Agreement Before (with Edits from Council) changes approved by Council.
Contract Agreement After.
Corrections: We added links to documents and corrected statement that solicitation of investors was to the trampoline park.
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