“We got wind that he was discouraged and reached out and tried to see what was going on,” Mueller said. 20, connecting it to city water and sewer lines, and granting a property tax abatement. But Mayor James Mueller soon contacted him and urged him not to give up on the idea for the site.Īs then-Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s community investment director, Mueller had overseen early city support of the project, which has included annexing the site southwest of the U.S. Tarner, who has been digging for dinosaur bones in Montana for 20 years, said he started shopping the dinosaur museum concept to other communities and some expressed interest. At that time, I couldn’t really see a future besides my personal bankruptcy.”

At the airport, we went from doing $8,000 a day to $50. “I was paying my bills the way I’d done my whole life and the economy just stopped. “I know there has been (identity theft) fraud (with the PPP program) but I had about two weeks worth of money left,” he said. Federal records show he received about $1.76 million. It was dark.”īut Tarner said forgivable federal Paycheck Protection Program loans helped him survive. Tarner said an immediate and nearly total drop in revenue caused by the pandemic’s economic shutdown had him on the verge of bankruptcy, and he had just become “shocked and upset” to learn that the South Bend-Elkhart Regional Development Authority was canceling a $500,000 state of Indiana grant for the estimated $14 million project because he couldn’t start construction by April 2021 as required by the grant guidelines. “I’ve never had a failure, or a public failure, to this level and it really affected me more mentally than anything else.”ĬOVID survivors confident: Survey finds businesses that made it through so far think they can bounce back “At that time, I was really blue,” Tarner said. The amateur paleontologist’s enthusiasm painted a far different picture from the one he conveyed to The Tribune in late March, when he said it seemed the project could be dead.

For now he has the massive bones casted and sitting on skids in a warehouse behind his company headquarters at 3300 Sample St. “I think it’s going to happen,” Tarner said Wednesday while showing reporters some dinosaur bones he said he recently excavated from Montana. founder Mark Tarner said COVID-19 might have killed his plans to build a new factory, dinosaur museum and restaurant west of the South Bend International Airport, the entrepreneur says the project has new life. SOUTH BEND - Nearly eight months after South Bend Chocolate Co.

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