The donation came a year after Manny Ramirez was elected county commissioner for Precinct 4 and months before he would vote to approve a public improvement district for land now owned by the donor.
Mehrdad Moayedi, the developer who will benefit from the recently approved public improvement district on Bonds Ranch Road, donated $25,000 to Ramirez late last year, a couple months after he gave County Judge Tim O’Hare $10,000. The improvement district is in Ramriez’s precinct.
A look into Moayedi’s past reveals unfinished projects, years-long delays, alleged faulty construction and alleged involvement in a securities fraud scheme, according to media reports and court records. He is president and CEO of Centurion American Development Group, which plans to build 1,100 homes on the improvement district site near Eagle Mountain Lake.
Centurion American is the sole owner of the property. It finalized the purchase of the land on April 9, a week after the public improvement district was approved, according to David Davidson Jr., the real estate agent who brokered the deal. The company announced plans for The Estates at Eagle Mountain a few days later.
The public improvement district stipulates that the county will sell bonds to finance the construction of critical infrastructure like roads, water and sewer, and those funds will be reimbursed by an extra property tax paid by homeowners once the lots are developed and sold. This benefits developers by shifting the cost of building infrastructure onto home buyers. The public improvement district only covers the property owned by Centurion American and does not address construction or improvement of arterial roads.
It is unclear whether the bonds will be up-front payments or reimbursements for completed work, as the terms of the deal are still being negotiated, according to county spokesperson Bill Hanna. However, a Commissioners Court communication on the district’s approval said that “it is expected that the developer of the property will ask the County to levy assessments and issue bonds secured solely by these assessments to pay for these costs.” It could take up to a year for the negotiated deal to come back before the commissioners court.
Also up for negotiation is how long property owners will be taxed, but public improvement district assessments are usually set for a term of 30 years, Tarrant County Economic Development Manager Maegan South told commissioners ahead of the vote to approve the district. The property will be annexed into the Fort Worth city limits once the assessment is paid off.
Tarrant County has only approved one other public improvement district, and no bonds were ever issued for it, making it “essentially inactive,” Hanna said in an email.
The Star-Telegram received statements in favor of the public improvement district from representatives of the city of Fort Worth, the Eagle Mountain-Saginaw school district and the Northwest Fort Worth Alliance, as well as from Precinct 1 Commissioner Roy Brooks and O’Hare.
“This is a new day in north Fort Worth and Tarrant County. In the past, it has been after-the-fact and more adversarial but now, we are proactively coming together to work with developers on the front end to have a balance. It’s very exciting to see this kind of collaboration because it benefits everybody,” said Eagle Mountain Saginaw ISD Superintendent Jim Chadwell.
The only vote against the public improvement district came from commissioner Alisa Simmons, who questioned Moayedi’s reputation and business history in North Texas ahead of the vote.
“I would just hate to see homeowners shafted,” she said after bringing up concerns over media reports of Moayedi’s history in the Metroplex. Simmons did not respond to a request for comment for this story.
South said ahead of the vote that the county had thoroughly researched the public improvement district’s stakeholders, but she did not have a comment on the concerns Simmons brought up.
“We’ve done our homework, we have given ourselves all the protections that we can give us as the county,” South said.
Ramirez said in an interview that his research into Moayedi before the approval of the public improvement district found the developer to be reputable in North Texas. He had not heard of the issues with Moayedi’s past before the Star-Telegram brought them to him, though Simmons had mentioned them ahead of the vote.
Defrauded investors and undelivered development
Moayedi and Centurion American were involved in a scheme that defrauded investors out of millions of dollars, according to multiple civil lawsuits filed against him and related companies, which are still in litigation.
In the mid-2010s, Centurion American was the largest borrower of loans from multiple real estate investment trusts operated by Grapevine-based United Development Funding. The FBI executed a search warrant on UDF’s offices in February 2016, and the investigation ultimately led to the convictions of four UDF executives who were sentenced to a combined 20 years in prison in May 2022.
A spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Texas said the office could not comment on the case, as it is being petitioned to the Supreme Court.
While he was not indicted in that criminal case, Moayedi was named in several civil cases against him and others involved in UDF’s scheme by investors who claimed to have suffered losses.
The scheme involved several UDF investment vehicles, according to prosecutors. Funds raised by UDF IV, for example, were used to pay off investors of UDF III. Moayedi facilitated these payments by channeling them through Centurion American and other companies disguised as loans, according to a 2022 lawsuit filed against UDF’s investment adviser and executives by Dallas-based real estate investor NexPoint.
“UDF’s scheme would not have been possible without Moayedi,” the lawsuit states. “Based upon information obtained in connection with the criminal trial, we now know UDF’s ‘loan portfolio’ was a disaster and most of the loans were non-performing and under collateralized. The collective portfolio was highly concentrated in a single borrower, Mr. Moayedi.”
A lawsuits brought against Moayedi by home builder Megatel Homes makes similar allegations.
Moayedi initially agreed to an interview for this story, but later canceled and requested written questions. He said he could not comment on litigation and that he “generously supports numerous non-profit organizations and candidates who share his values, irrespective of their political affiliation.”
The majority of the more than $1.2 million that Moayedi has made in political donations went to Republican candidates and politicians, while $27,500 went to Democratic politicians and organizations.
North Texas cities that have entered into development agreements with Moayedi have found themselves struggling to bring the projects to completion years after they were scheduled to be done.
The town of Westlake approved a public improvement district for a Centurion American development called Entrada in 2015. The company sold the property to Mooreland Construction in 2022 after getting less than a tenth of the planned residential units built.
As of March 2023, 30 of an expected 322 residential lots had completed houses on them, according to the public improvement district’s most recent service and assessment plan. Less than 95,000 square feet of nearly 1.2 million square feet of expected commercial development had been completed.
This is because the developer had pushed for zoning changes, converting what were originally mixed-use areas to residential and concentrating commercial zones in one specific area, according to Wade Carroll, who started as Westlake Town Manager in March 2023. He saw Centurion American do the same with a development in a public improvement district in Trophy Club when he was town manager there from 2017 to last year.
In Trophy Club, Carroll saw a situation similar to what commissioner Simmons feared when she voted against the Bonds Ranch public improvement district: homeowners on the hook for the cost of infrastructure while the developer walks away with the profit. Carroll has received many calls from residents who were angry that they were paying public improvement district assessments on top of their property taxes.
“Well, that’s because you bought the infrastructure twice, basically, you pay for it through the [public improvement district],” Carroll said. “But if the developer doesn’t lower the price of the property, which they never do, then that’s going to increase the profit margin for the developer, but it’s going to make the homeowner pay twice for that.”
Moayedi responded to questions about Entrada by saying that Centurion American does not own the property. The company sold it to Mooreland Construction in 2022.
“However, I can tell you that like so many other sectors, the pandemic impacted our industry as a whole and delays were not unheard of,” Moayedi said. “In fact, we saw a temporary pause at Mercer Crossing as the city reviewed and updated the plan to ensure the project aligned with the community’s best interests.”
Mercer Crossing is another Centurion American development in Farmers Branch that also saw years-long delays and disgruntled residents.
To hear residents say it during a July 2020 Farmers Branch City Council meeting, the community’s best interests included a grocery store they said they had been promised when they bought their homes. When Moayedi said he never promised a grocery store, one resident pointed out that the store was featured in sales videos, leading him and others to expect that one would be part of the planned commercial construction.
At that meeting, council members questioned Moayedi about the delays and unfinished commercial spaces. Moayedi said then that delays had been due to the unexpected necessity of dredging a lake early on in the development.
That meeting also saw former Mayor Robert Dye accuse then council member Terry Lynne of being “bought and sold” by the developer.
Dye declined to comment for this story. Lynne did not respond to a request for comment.
Centurion American is also the developer behind the City Point mixed-use development in North Richland Hills. The project is starting to see delays in commercial construction, according to Craig Hulse, the city’s head of economic development. While the city is not worried about the project, Hulse said they are “playing catch up” and wishing work would speed up.
“We are not disappointed or anything by their efforts, although we would like them to expedite,” he said in a phone interview.
Flooded apartments and SEC investigations
In 2017, after three years and $230 million in renovations, the Statler Hotel reopened in downtown Dallas. The developer behind the redo was Centurion American.
The grand reopening was sandwiched between some troubling news for Moayedi’s company. Just a couple months before, the project found itself the focus of an SEC investigation into its funding and construction.
The SEC investigates possible violations of securities law, but an SEC spokesperson declined to comment on the case. It was unclear if the investigation is ongoing.
A couple months after the reopening, the sprinklers broke and flooded rooms, prompting the fire department to put the hotel on round-the-clock fire watch.
“The owners are in the process of correcting all issues and are committed to provide a first-class hotel and residences,” a company representative told The Dallas Morning News at the time.
That paper found that Centurion American waited about a month to report the sprinkler failures to the fire department, in spite of city rules mandating they be immediately alerted to such issues.
Did Ramirez know of Moayedi’s history?
The $25,000 that Moayedi gave the Ramirez campaign was the largest donation in the commissioner’s most recent campaign finance report, $15,000 more than the second largest on the list. It was also donated the year after Ramirez won his four-year term as county commissioner of Precinct 4, where the public improvement district is located. Moayedi does not appear on Ramirez’s previous campaign finance reports.
But for Ramirez, Moayedi is just one of a “very broad, very diverse” list of donors to his campaign. The commissioner told the Star-Telegram in an interview that he had never heard of any of the issues in Moayedi’s past before voting to approve the Bonds Ranch public improvement district.
People in real estate whom he consulted about Moayedi told him that the developer has “a great reputation in the industry,” Ramirez said. “[If] I’m told that from the outset, I mean, I have no reason to say, “All right, is he not a good contractor?’”
For Ramirez, voting for the Bonds Ranch public improvement district was a way to control density in the area as it grows. By working with Centurion American on the district, the county was able to ensure that 1,100 single-family homes go on the land, and not 10,000 apartments, he said.
“I don’t have a say in whether or not he buys that land, so we kind of have to deal with what we get,” Ramirez said. “You either have to have a seat at the table or you’re on the table.”
Under state law, the county does not have the authority to implement or enforce any kind of zoning in unincorporated areas, according to the Tarrant County Transportation Services Department.
Centurion American did not buy the land until after the public improvement district was approved.
After becoming aware of Moayedi’s history in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, Ramirez expressed concern for its possible implications for the Bonds Ranch project.
“I certainly am not pleased that a developer would have a past that would tend to put any shade on it,” he said. “That to me is concerning, just because it’s such a rare opportunity to protect an area as it grows.”
O’Hare did not address the issues with Moayedi’s past, but said in a statement that “Tarrant County Administration conducted extensive research and due diligence” before the public improvement district was brought before the Commissioners Court.
Staff writer Jaime Moore-Carrillo contributed to this report.