Last edited 5:09 p.m., April 5, 2012Jim Shirato and Donald Snider, whose companies are involved in the Branson West-based development Indian Ridge Resort Community, were sentenced yesterday in federal court for violations of the Clean Water Act.
Shirato, owner of Indian Ridge Resort Inc., and Snider, owner of Denver-based North Shore Investments LLC, broke ground in 2005 on the planned $1.6 billion, 850-acre development in Stone County. North Shore Investments purchased a portion of the land that year to build 13 townhouses.
A lawsuit had claimed that between August 2006 and June 2009 the developers failed to abate, control or slow erosion from the site construction, which had disturbed roughly 600 acres of land southeast of Highway 76 and Highway 13, according to a news release from the office of the U.S. attorney for the Western District of Missouri. In
November guilty pleas, Shirato and Snider admitted they failed to prevent storm-water runoff at the construction site from pushing silt into Table Rock Lake.
The sentence enforces the terms of the guilty pleas with fines of $215,000 and $100,000 for Shirato and Snider, respectively. The sentence terms also include five years of probation, which includes a compliance clause to prevent further erosion and discharge of sediment from the construction site into the lake and its tributaries.
In the Nov. 28 Springfield Business Journal article "
Indian Ridge development takes another knock," Shirato said it had been difficult to comply with the Environmental Protection Agency and the Missouri Department of Natural Resources because of continued issues with the project's financing. The project's funding was frozen in August 2008 after regulators shut down the development's lead lender, Topeka, Kan.-based The Columbian Bank and Trust Co.
At the time, Shirato said he expected funding to be fully released in the first quarter.
This morning, he said his company will finish working with the latest of several Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. committees today. That committee, he said, is moving on to deal with another shut down bank after about six months working with Indian Ridge Resort Inc. The funding now will likely be released in the second quarter under a a new committee, he said.
"It defies logic," Shirato said of working of being unable to come to a conclusion with the FDIC for more than three years. "This is the story (for which) Hemingway should rise from the dead and write another book."
He pointed to a number of issues holding back the frozen funding, particularly issues surrounding the lawsuit.
"The FDIC would not talk to the EPA. The EPA would not talk to the FDIC. And we're squeezed in the middle," Shirato said.
He said 139 jobs are waiting on construction to start back up again, and once it does, it would take about 37 months to complete the development.[[In-content Ad]]
