An out-of-state businessman is one step closer to his goal of building a manufacturing facility behind the Metrocenter Mall after the Jackson City Council voted to approve his rezoning request on Monday.
However, he may no longer own some of the land he wants to build on after years of failing to pay property taxes.
Christopher Jones, a South Carolina businessman, wants to build a small industrial facility behind the abandoned mall in west Jackson to manufacture recycled plastic foam and concrete blocks through his company, BioCrete Global Manufacturing.
If it comes to fruition, the project would bring economic development to a part of Mississippi’s capital city virtually bereft of industry. Jones has said that this project would be phase one of his larger plan to revitalize the area.
But after Jones repeatedly failed to pay years of property taxes, two of the three parcels he asked the city council to rezone became state-owned, tax-forfeited property last year, according to the Hinds County landroll.
The upper level at Metrocenter Mall in Jackson. Credit: Vickie D. King/Mississippi TodayThe secretary of state’s office confirmed on Monday that the state owns the two parcels. Jones is set to lose the third parcel to the state this fall if he does not pay his back taxes.
Jones says he paid part of the taxes but the county made administrative missteps that have made him distrustful of the process so he is waiting for pending litigation to pay the remainder.
The businessman is now suing Hinds County and the state of Mississippi to regain his ownership of the vacant lots. While the county is not contesting the lawsuit, Jones is facing opposition from the attorney general’s office.
Despite the legal issues, the council on Monday voted 6-0 to approve the rezoning request – from mixed use to industrial – after asking no questions about Jones’ ownership of the lots. Several of Jones’ trainees, many of whom were wearing name tags and white lab coats, broke out into loud applause after the vote.
“We are not in danger of not doing what we say we are going to do,” Jones told the council. “So we are going to do it no matter what, no matter if we get the participation that we need. We’re dug into this. We have a lot of investment already, and we just can’t see it fail.”
After the meeting, Ward 5 council member Vernon Hartley said he didn’t ask about Jones’ unpaid taxes because the businessman had included a warranty deed with his rezoning application that he submitted to the city in January.
Ward 5 Jackson City Council Vice President Vernon Hartley during a council meeting at City Hall, Tuesday, Aug. 26, 2025, in Jackson. Credit: Vickie D. King/Mississippi TodayWhen Mississippi Today told Hartley the county landroll shows the state of Mississippi owns two of the three parcels that Jones wants to redevelop, the councilman said he did not want the city to be the reason a project fails.
“We’re going to allow it to go until it doesn’t go,” Hartley said.
Ward 2 council member Tina Clay said she was not aware that Jones was delinquent on his taxes but that she still would have voted for the rezoning. If Jones’ proposal falls through, Clay reasoned the rezoning could help another future developer.
“I mean, we zoned the land, we didn’t zone him,” she said.
Ester Ainsworth, the city’s zoning administrator, said the legal department spoke with Jones about the unpaid taxes but that she hasn’t seen anything on the landroll showing ownership has changed.
“That’s something that’s going to have to be worked out in another realm,” she said. “Like I said, the information that we have shows that he does (own the parcels).”
The warranty deed shows that Jones purchased the property in 2022, but he has failed to pay his taxes since, according to the landroll.
Like many property owners who lose land through Mississippi’s notoriously dysfunctional tax sale process, Jones is alleging that he never received proper notice the county was going to put his property up for sale.
This argument often works in Mississippi courts, since many counties do not provide owners with a certified notice their property will be in a tax sale — a routine process through which individuals and limited liability companies bid on properties with unpaid taxes in exchange for a future interest they can use as leverage to get the original owner to repay back taxes.
In the case of Jones’s lots, no one bid on the parcels, so they were “struck” to the state in 2023. Jones had until last year to maintain his clear ownership of the properties by paying the back taxes, but he didn’t do that.
Hinds County is not contesting the lawsuit. But the attorney general’s office is putting up a fight, filing a motion last month that Jones should not be able to argue he never received notice because he didn’t need one – since he’s known for years about the unpaid taxes.
“Christopher Jones is coming to the Court with unclean hands, as he knew that he would have to redeem the subject tax parcels … or they would mature to the State of Mississippi,” Nancy Morse Parkes, a special assistant to the attorney general, wrote in the March 6 motion.
Parkes’ basis for alleging this was a statement she said Jones made to her “off the record” following a court proceeding last year – also concerning Jones’ unpaid property taxes – in which he stated “that he would pay all of the taxes.”
The parcels on which Jones intends to build the manufacturing facility are lots of cracked and barren concrete behind the Metrocenter. Rezoning them was a key step in Jones’ yearslong efforts to redevelop part of the dilapidated mall in west Jackson.
To gin up support, Jones has held press conferences and employment fairs, claiming the facility will create 200 jobs along Jackson’s U.S. 80 corridor.
“We know that this’ll be a gamechanger,” he told Mississippi Today, adding that “Jackson and Hinds County could benefit very well from the workforce here getting some really good jobs in the city.”
Jones said that he intends to pay the back taxes on the property after he receives a court order establishing that he is the rightful owner. He called the tax sales “an adverse taking.”
“There was a lot of dispute concerning the property and the taxes and notifications,” he said. “All those things were helter skelter, everything was all over the place, no clarification or anything, and so the clerk did not perform the duties as outlined by statute.”
The businessman added that he doesn’t trust the system in Hinds County because he did in fact pay a sliver of the back taxes he owes – about $1,900 on one of the parcels last fall. He said he didn’t understand why the county once again sent the parcel to a tax sale.
A review of the landroll shows that’s because Jones paid just one year of back taxes on one parcel, when he in fact owed three years of taxes for three parcels. The total owed amounted to nearly $20,000, according to the landrolls.
“Yeah, I don’t understand the process, that’s what I’m saying,” Jones told Mississippi Today. “I don’t understand the process in Mississippi. If you pay the money, then everything should clear out and it shouldn’t take months to do that, but when I paid that small amount and nothing happened, it continued to still reflect the tax situation for that year.”
This is not the first time big plans have been proposed for the former Metrocenter property. In 2022, WLBT reported a woman who purchased the Metrocenter Mall and pledged to revitalize it was arrested on a warrant out of Jefferson County in southwest Mississippi for failing to pay restitution on a 2013 conviction for false pretenses.
“We cannot go through any more trauma of hearing projects being announced, projects being proposed and not following through on them,” said Ricky Jones, the president of the West Jackson Community Improvement Association, describing his hesitations about BioCrete’s project, even as he spoke in favor of it at the council meeting.
Metrocenter opened in 1978. At the time, it was “Mississippi’s largest and most complete under-one-roof shopping center,” according to the Clarion-Ledger.
Activity at the shopping center began to decline in the 2000s, a trend suffered by many malls across America, but in Jackson it was accelerated by white flight and divestment from the city’s western and southern areas.
Big stores moved out, and while there were attempts to revive it, the 1,250,000-square-foot mall shut its doors completely in 2022.
“I don’t know what it is about the Metrocenter, but nothing goes smoothly,” Jones said.
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