The massive Cold War era barracks at McClellan known in military lingo as “starships” are for sale. Again.
The property — previously owned by locally based Xtreme Concepts, Inc. — was sold earlier this year for back taxes owed by that company. Pine Valley One, a Chicago-based tax and asset company, paid those taxes and currently has a lien on the property.
According to the Calhoun County revenue commissioner’s office, Xtreme Concepts — a company that provided tactical training and bomb-detection dogs — has three years to pay back the lien company to prevent Pine Valley One from owning it outright.
The Luxe Group realty group listed the property last month online for $1.5 million, with phrasing such as “Deal of the day” and “This is a steal for some special buyer.” Originally priced at $5 million, according to the listing, the property now has a “new out the door price.”
According to the listing, the property consists of 30 separate concrete buildings, three million square feet of indoor space, 10 barracks with 20 rooms each, two large gymnasiums, and 90-plus acres of usable flat land located in the heart of McClellan.
Julie Moss, executive director of the McClellan Development Authority, said Thursday people are currently looking at the property.
“Hopefully we’ll get somebody in there that will actually do something with the property,” Moss said.
“We want someone to come out here, bring jobs and develop a successful company that can be a good neighbor in our McClellan community,” she said.
Moss said the property had been deeded to Xtreme Concepts in June 2021 after then-Circuit Court Judge Debra Jones ruled the MDA had to sell the property in a court order in 2020.
Business operations ceased at the facility a few months after the deed was recorded, Moss said.
“There’s no dogs being trained out there at all, there’s nothing going on,” Moss said.
The order brought an end to a long court battle over one of the biggest land deals made by the local agency charged with redeveloping the former Fort McClellan Army base.
Xtreme Concepts transactions
Prior to Xtreme Concepts’ arrival on the scene, the starships complex was proving difficult to sell, but then Landon Ash, an heir to the Golden Flake potato chip fortune, offered to acquire it as a headquarters for Xtreme Concepts. The company leased the property in 2015, in a contract that allowed Xtreme the option to buy the buildings.
Xtreme stopped paying its rent sometime in 2018, according to court testimony. In November of that year, Xtreme announced it would exercise its option to buy. The MDA’s board of directors voted in February 2019 to sell the barracks complex for $1.2 million — but the board backed out of the deal a month later.
In court hearings in June 2019, MDA officials said they canceled the deal because of what they saw as bad behavior by Xtreme. They said runoff from dog kennels on the site had contributed to high levels of E. coli in nearby Cane Creek. MDA officials also cited use of explosives during training events at the site, which they said violated the company’s lease.
In 2019 an employee of Xtreme Concepts had to be airlifted to a hospital for burns and a fracture after working with gunpowder at the barracks according to published reports.
2005: Hurricane Katrina
The starships were spruced up in a large community effort to welcome evacuees from areas damaged by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Then-Gov. Bob Riley visited the site to cheer on the efforts of a multitude of volunteers who tidied up and landscaped in and around the barracks. Ultimately very few evacuees actually stayed at starships, opting for the FEMA housing located nearby.
A visit to the property on Thursday revealed overgrown weeds alongside the gray, grim concrete structures that evoke the mood of a movie set in an apocalyptic future.
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