The former Bowling Green Junior High School complex at 1141 Center St. will avoid foreclosure, but that doesn’t necessarily mean its conversion to apartments - stalled for three and a half years - is any closer to restarting.

Back in August 2008, City Attorney Gene Harmon sent a letter to the project’s primary owner, Woodland Hills, Calif.-based Alliant Capital, to say that the city would file a foreclosure action. The reason: Property taxes for 2006 and 2007 were delinquent, to the tune of $18,000. The 2008 tax bill was also unpaid, but that didn’t yet qualify for foreclosure.

The city usually holds tax foreclosures until a substantial number are ready, then files them together, Harmon said. He was preparing to file a bunch last week, including the junior high, when Alliant finally paid up - $39,099.51 all together.

But that payment was not accompanied by any word that Alliant planned to restart work on the three unfinished buildings, according to City Manager Kevin DeFebbo.

A call to Brian Doran, senior vice president for real estate investments for Alliant Asset Management Co., a division of Alliant Capital, brought only the response that he was traveling and unavailable for comment. That’s the same answer given to similar questions in the past year.

Meanwhile, paying off its city bill doesn’t get Alliant out of tax debt. Warren County property taxes for 2006 through 2008 also went unpaid, said Tax Deputy Carol Hurd in the Warren County Sheriff’s Office, but the county doesn’t foreclose on delinquent taxpayers - it places liens on the property, and sells unpaid bills to outside firms.

The junior high’s tax bills were sold to American Tax Funding of Orlando, Fla. Sarah Harp, deputy clerk in the Warren County Clerk’s Office, said the liens are still in force. And according to American Tax Funding, Alliant’s county tax bill of $17,273.79 has still not been paid.

Georgia-based developer Robert McMaster came to Bowling Green in 2002 to build Park Row Senior Apartments, and took on the junior high, too.

He planned to convert it into 110 apartments for low- to moderate-income residents, and bought the buildings from the Bowling Green Board of Education for $800,000. Kentucky Housing Corp. approved $711,000 in tax credits for the project in September 2002.

The total project cost was originally estimated to be $9.4 million, with $5.7 million backed by federal mortgage lender Fannie Mae. Construction was to start in early 2003, with the first units rented in January 2004. But radon problems pushed plans back to August 2003, with completion scheduled for a year later. Meanwhile, McMaster bundled the junior high, Park Row and several other projects into one $25 million-plus financing package.

Work was delayed again, and groundbreaking for both the junior high and Park Row did not come until March 2004. He finished the Park Row apartments, though they went $900,000 over budget, and completed one new building in the junior high complex. McMaster blamed unexpected work to remove bedrock for further delay, but that expense and the Park Row cost ran the project out of money, bringing work to a near halt in December 2005.

He repeatedly promised that work would resume shortly, although he continued to owe money to local contractors, couldn’t line up new investors and eventually stopped taking calls. Developers in other states said McMaster had a pattern of beginning big jobs and then failing to finish.

The state tax credits were renewed in October 2007, and in that same month Doran’s firm, a major investor from the start, took over. Two months later, Doran said he hoped to restart work in early 2008, but virtually nothing has been heard since.

Previous developer Robert McMaster estimated in 2006 that it would take $2 million to finish the job, but Mayor Elaine Walker has said the latest figure she’s heard put that price at more than $5 million.