Spokane Club Deal Fails; Course Stays Public Members’ Interest Lags, General Manager Says - Nothing Negative Said About Golf Course
The Spokane Club’s plans to turn the Highlands Golf Course into its members’ private playground never got off the tee.
Spokane Club General Manager Alan Arsenault said Wednesday that the club won’t buy up all the 1996 tee times at Highlands Golf and Country Club, a move that would have essentially locked the gates to the public.
The primary reason: Spokane Club members weren’t interested.
Local golfers who hated the idea of losing the Highlands as a public course welcomed the news.
The Spokane Club struck a deal with the Coles family in July to convert the Highlands to a private course.
The club mailed out brochures to its 3,200 members asking them to buy the tee times.
“It’s a democratic process, since the members own the club,” Arsenault said. “We didn’t get the participation or the interest we expected.”
The course’s distance from Spokane may have also turned members off, Arsenault said. “But we didn’t hear anything negative about the Highlands.”
Some Idaho golfers frowned on the idea that Spokane’s upper crust would snatch away one of the area’s most-liked public links.
Highlands regulars who stood to be shut out of tee times next year cheered the development.
“I think it’s great,” said Coy Phillips, a manager at Golf USA in Hayden Lake. He shoots the Highlands often.
“It’s a great course,” Phillips said. “It’s not very heavily traveled, like Coeur d’Alene Public, for example. It makes you use every club in your bag.”
Robert Coles built the course and developed the pricey homes around the rolling hills perched over Post Falls. The Coles family home, worth $1.5 million, was the feature attraction in the North Idaho Building Contractor’s Association Parade of Homes this summer.
“We didn’t know that it would work when we agreed,” said John Coles, manager of the Highlands Golf and Country Club. “We both thought it was worth the effort.”
The failed deal represents the Spokane Club’s third unsuccessful attempt at boosting its members’ services.
The club tried unsuccessfully to buy the Central Park Racquet and Athletic Club and to merge with Spokane’s Brotherhood of Friends earlier this year.
The Spokane Club will keep thinking of the Highlands as its “home course,” Arsenault said. More Spokane Club tournaments could be added there, for example.
The Spokane Club will continue to try to add more features for its members, Arsenault said. He could not say Wednesday whether the club would try to privatize another golf course for its members.
, DataTimes