Dead center: Outsiders fight for Copia's remains while the site sits idle, perhaps for years

It’s been nearly five months since Copia hosted its last dinner.

It may be much longer than that before life stirs anew on the 12-acre property that was, for seven flawed but sometimes spectacular years, Napa’s center for wine, food and the arts.

The Copia bankruptcy case has taken unpredictable turns.

Larger economic forces are impeding progress in the case. The future is uncertain.

The tasks of winding down Copia, selling off the assets, freeing up the property, finding a buyer or buyers, having the new owner or owners gain city approval for their plans and actually seeing the land come back to life might take as long as Copia’s entire lifespan, from grand opening to sudden closing.

Here’s what has happened so far. In November, Copia closed. In December, it filed for bankruptcy, with officials proposing the center could work its way out of debt

Soon thereafter, its bankruptcy plan was rejected and the plan shifted: Copia would sell off its assets, the primary one being the 12 acres bordering the Napa River, and distribute the proceeds to the highest-priority creditors among the nearly 400 left out in cold when the center closed.

Now it appears that plan is to be reset.

The chances are good that next week, a new bankruptcy plan will be approved for the defunct center for wine, food and the arts, one in which people who have had absolutely nothing to do with Copia will take control of its bones.

The reason this firm, Copia Claims LLC, might earn this right is that it stands a better chance of paying off priority creditors than the company that currently has that responsibility, ACA Financial Guaranty Corp.

ACA, a Maryland insurance company, has financial troubles — stemming from the wider mortgage and securities meltdown — far more serious and costly than the collapse of Copia.

Should a bankruptcy judge approve the new plan, Copia Claims LLC, which was formed precisely to take over the bankruptcy process, expects to pursue a complicated financial claim having to do with whether the investors who provided the money to build Copia in 1999 were adequately protected by the refinancing of the center in 2007.

This involves tangled financial and legal questions. What it does not involve is anyone who cares at all about Napa, about the 12 acres in the Oxbow district, about the Copia gardens or anything to do with the center. Copia now is just a pawn in a money game.

Napa Valley Register Copyright © 2009