On Golden Ponds N. Idaho Lakes Grow More Exclusive

The first of two parts.

Don’t blame Californians for gobbling up North Idaho’s spectacular waterfront.

Despite the big migration from the Golden State in the early 1990s, and soaring prices for lakeside lots, Idaho and its residents still control most of Kootenai County’s waterfront.

Second in command are Washington residents. Californians run a distant third.

But the unending quest for lakeside or riverfront property is transforming North Idaho’s waterfront. New homes are larger and more exclusive. Public beaches and boat launches are more crowded. And the price of waterfront property is climbing beyond the means of the middle class.

“It’s hard to find a little fishing cabin,” said Sally Robideaux, a Hayden Lake real estate agent. “People are buying them and building big homes, BIG homes.”

Kootenai County is lake country. Its 14 lakes are circled by 141 miles of shoreline. The fresh water, plentiful fish and natural beauty have drawn people for thousands of years.

The Coeur d’Alene Indians were followed by trappers and missionaries, homesteaders, miners and, more recently, retirees and affluent families searching for a better life.

Silver Valley businessman Harry Magnuson owns the biggest chunk of waterfront in the county. His 5-1/2 miles of shoreline contain some of the most undeveloped and prized waterfront left on Lake Coeur d’Alene and the Spokane River.

Vera Sagli of Spokane owns one of the smallest pieces. Her little cabin on Spirit Lake boasts just 7 feet of waterfront.

Then there are newcomers like Clifford and Sandra Allen.

The couple from Draper, Utah, recently bought a $280,000 North Idaho beach lot. They searched for the right property for six years, then found Lake Coeur d’Alene. It met their criteria: access to water and snow sports, as well as a dry climate.

The Allens also discovered that waterfront here is two or three times cheaper than at McCall, Idaho, or Lake Tahoe, Calif.

“The price didn’t bother me,” said Clifford Allen, an executive with an electronics company. “To me it’s like a wedding ring. It’s like an investment, but you wear it forever.”

By local standards, that investment doesn’t come cheap.

Average home prices range from $95,500 on Spirit Lake to $420,800 on the Spokane River.

Choice properties command prices unheard of just a few years ago. While Hayden Lake’s west shore has long attracted upscale buyers, the county’s glitziest homes now are rising on the Spokane River near Post Falls.

Consider the home of millionaire Amway distributor Ron Puryear. His $2 million riverfront home, all 26,000 square feet of it, is the most expensive residence on Kootenai County’s waterfront.

As prices rise with the growing population, so does public use of the water. That has lake and river users fighting for space on the mere 5 percent of waterfront preserved for public use.

Higher prices also mean hardship for people whose families purchased waterfront decades ago. Longtime landowners are getting squeezed off the lake by skyrocketing taxes.

“Demographics change. How can you stop it?” said Buddy Paul, president of the Coeur d’Alene Lakeshore Property Owners Association. “Lake property used to be accessible to most people with good jobs. It still took some money, but people with good white collar or blue collar jobs could find a place on the lake.”

Top landowners

Harry and Colleen Magnuson purchased their summer home in 1963 with its 525 feet of shoreline, turn-of-the-century stone seawall and towering pines. The original core of the log home was built in 1888.

“I guess you could say it was love at first sight,” Colleen Magnuson said.

The home was the first waterfront purchase for the Magnusons, and the beginning of several.

A friend told Magnuson, “Harry, the waterfront property, there’s only so much of it. It’s great stuff,” Harry Magnuson recalled. “So we commenced to buying a little piece here and a little piece there.”

The Magnusons own more lake or river frontage than the state of Idaho, the federal government or any other individual or company. Their holdings include the summer home with a beach in Casco Bay, more than a mile of undeveloped land on the Spokane River, and much more undeveloped property on Lake Coeur d’Alene.

“We keep holding it as a long-term investment,” he said. “We don’t have any plans.”

Magnuson said he waits until the population fills in around his land, “and then you get an opportunity to develop it.”

That kind of opportunity surfaced in 1992 in the form of Riverside Harbor, an upscale subdivision on the Spokane River. The Post Falls land once belonged to Magnuson’s Coeur d’Alene Land Co. He still owns a large chunk of riverfront nearby.

While Magnuson is king on the lake’s north end, Buell Brothers Inc. and Jean Maucieri reign over the shoreline to the south.

Maucieri’s hold on more than 8,000 feet of frontage began when her parents homesteaded near Harrison in 1910. They purchased most of their waterfront during the Depression, when land was cheap.

“They always held onto the land because they loved it so much,” she said.

Maucieri, 83, is doing the same for her children. She lives there during the summer. One son stays on the 297-acre property year round, while she spends the winters in Los Angeles.

If she has her way, the property will retain its rustic, remote character long after she’s gone.

“It’s worth a lot of money if we want to sell it to a developer and see it cut up into five- and 10-acre lots, but we don’t want to do that,” she said. “We love it the way it is.”

Robert and Jack Buell own 9,020 feet of waterfront in Kootenai County, and more in Benewah County. The brothers grow timber, but are developing 104 acres into 24 lots in Browns Bay on the west shore of Lake Coeur d’Alene.

“Most of our business in land and timber is buying land and logging it, then turning it back and re-logging it,” Robert Buell said.

That’s also what Inland Empire Paper Co. does with its property above Spirit Lake. The Spokane paper company - an affiliate of Cowles Publishing Co., which owns The Spokesman-Review - is among the top 10 waterfront owners in the county.

But the company’s land agent, John Hay, said the paper company is a reluctant lakefront owner.

Some of the property is too steep to log. As for the rest, “we don’t really want to log it and create a big furor, but we don’t hold onto the land for a pretty view,” Hay said.

The company has traded or sold its waterfront land on Lake Coeur d’Alene and is interested in doing the same thing on Spirit Lake, he said.

Three years ago, Inland Empire Paper traded a parcel on Lake Coeur d’Alene’s Stevens Point with Wescor Forest Products. Wescor now is developing an exclusive subdivision.

Spirit Lake’s waterfront is dominated not by Inland Empire Paper, but by the Hohman brothers, who have a partnership called Pend Oreille Lodge Inc.

Wayne and William “Pete” Hohman inherited most of their land from their father, Cliff. The elder Hohman purchased hundreds of acres and dozens of homes in Spirit Lake in a 1941 auction that followed the closure of the Panhandle Lumber Co. sawmill.

The Hohmans developed Spirit Shores in the 1970s, and have sold all but five lots in the subdivision.

Most of their vacant waterfront is around the lake’s shallow millpond area, which now might be more accurately described as “mudfront.”

Cracks have split the lake bed, causing leaks. When the spring runoff is over, the lake gradually drops to a level much lower than in years past.

“The lakeshore isn’t valuable,” Wayne Hohman said. “Especially when it’s shallow and dries up and all that.”

The Hohmans say they have no immediate plans for the property except to manage it for timber production.

Sharing the view

Although most of the waterfront is in private hands, some landowners make sure the beach gets shared.

The Inland Empire Camp Fire Council, which operates Camp Sweyolakan and Camp Neewahlu on Lake Coeur d’Alene, hosts 8,000 visitors a year on its vast stretch of waterfront.

The original 16 acres of Sweyolakan were purchased in 1922 for about $5,000. The organization paid for the land in 11 days through donations.

Several other churches and organizations also operate waterfront camps. The United Church of Christ hosts about 3,000 people or more a year at Camp N-Sid-Sen on Lake Coeur d’Alene.

The state of Idaho has about four miles of waterfront, mostly along state parks and, to a lesser extent, Department of Fish and Game boat ramps.

Tens of thousands of people each year frequent Farragut State Park on Lake Pend Oreille, the Coeur d’Alene Parkway, the boater parks in Mica and Windy bays, and the smattering of boat launches and public docks around all of the county’s lakes.

Still, public access is a growing concern.

With only 5 percent of the county’s shoreline in public ownership, “that confines where people can play,” said Terry Kincaid of the Bureau of Land Management. “People who can afford their own piece of it don’t have to worry about it.”

The BLM began a push for waterfront property in 1989, when the public told the agency to acquire recreation and wildlife areas on Lake Coeur d’Alene.

Among the BLM’s recent acquisitions are 385 acres in Loffs Bay, almost 500 acres in Blue Creek Bay, 32 acres on Blackwell Island, 11 acres in Cougar Bay and a small recreation site on the Spokane River.

But government agencies, pressured to spend as few tax dollars as possible, are limited in what they can do when it comes to the priciest real estate in North Idaho.

“We’ve approached some (property) where we just didn’t have the funds to pursue,” said Dick Todd, a real estate specialist with the BLM.

Which means the public will continue to be squeezed into smaller spaces as tax money becomes more scarce and the wealthy scramble to buy what’s left of the shoreline.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 5 color photos Graphic: State by state

MEMO: These sidebars appeared with the story: COMING MONDAY High property taxes are squeezing longtime waterfront owners off their land. Today’s waterfront buyers include retirees, young families and people with ties to the area.

ABOUT THIS SERIES This report on Kootenai County’s waterfront is based on a Spokesman-Review computer analysis of property assessment records. Property values in this series are based on 1996 county assessments. Individual property records also were reviewed, and interviews were conducted with dozens of state and county officials, real estate agents and property owners.

ON THE WATER These people own some of the largest chunks of waterfront in Kootenai County.

Duane Hagadone Age: 65 Hometown: Coeur d’Alene Total waterfront acreage: 264 Business interests: Hagadone Hospitality (which owns the Coeur d’Alene Resort, its golf course and shopping plaza, the Coeur d’Alene Inn and Silver Beach Marina), apartments and condominiums, Hagadone Directories, The Coeur d’Alene Press and five other North Idaho newspapers.

Wayne Hohman Age: 57 Hometown: Post Falls Total waterfront acreage: 207 Business interests: Pend Oreille Lodge Inc., Hohman Properties, tree farming. Partner is brother William Hohman of Hayden Lake.

Robert Buell Age: 66 Hometown: Worley Total waterfront acreage: 198 Business interests: Buell Brothers Inc. land and logging company. Partner is Benewah County Commissioner Jack Buell, of Jack Buell Trucking.

Jean Maucieri Age: 83 Hometown: Los Angeles Total waterfront acreage: 297 Business interests: Retired, harvests some timber from Idaho property; widow of retired aerospace engineer John Maucieri.

H.F. “Harry” Magnuson Age: 74 Hometown: Wallace Total waterfront acreage: 984 Business interests: University City Shopping Center, mining stocks, residential and commercial development, accounting firm, philanthropy.

The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Story by Susan Drumheller Photography by Craig Buck