Leases between the District of Sechelt and Blue Ocean Golf Club are not lost, Mayor Bruce Milne clarified this week.
“Those lease agreements have never been lost and they’re not missing,” Milne told Coast Reporter. “They’re all bundled in a file or a couple of files under [acting municipal planner] Mike Vance’s management.”
The clarification was needed after director of finance Doug Stewart said at an Aug. 10 committee meeting that he hadn’t discovered a signed lease for the golf course in response to a question from Coun. Doug Wright.
Milne explained the remark was a bit of an inside joke as Stewart and other new senior staff have been “discovering” all sorts of things while going through the district’s files.
“They have been talking to us and among themselves about what they’re discovering as a new staff, and they’re discovering a lot of things. Some we’re not very happy about, and some we’re happy about,” Milne said.
“His comment was within that context of ‘well, I haven’t discovered that and I’m not sure what I’ll find when I go looking,’ rather than ‘it’s missing and I couldn’t find it.’”
Milne also noted Stewart and Wright weren’t talking about the ground leases for the golf course, rather an equipment lease that has $42,961 still owed to the municipality.
Sechelt leases and subleases the ground the golf course sits on to Blue Ocean Golf Club, and the club pays ground lease fees to the district based on a percentage of the revenue it makes.
There is still money owed to the district on that front, but Milne wasn’t sure how much because Blue Ocean hasn’t reported its revenues for 2016 yet.
“So they’re going to be nudged, obviously, on that one,” Milne said.
“That could just be a process issue in terms of the change of ownership.”
The golf course is currently renegotiating the ground leases and looking for a change in zoning to put up a hotel/spa, which triggers the need for discussion around issues such as servicing agreements (Blue Ocean is considering piping reclaimed water to its site), so everything to do with the golf course has been packaged in a file for Vance to handle.
And it’s a complicated file.
Two-thirds of the land under the golf course was granted to the District of Sechelt by the province with the stipulation it be used for a golf course. While Sechelt owns it fee simple, the land has to revert to the province if not used for golf.
The district holds the other third of the golf course lands as a Crown lease and the municipality subleases it to Blue Ocean.
The subleased portion of land is where Blue Ocean wants to situate its hotel/spa, and that requires consultation with the province and First Nations.
“The movement on this file has been stalled at the provincial and First Nations level. I think that’s important for people to understand,” Milne said, noting consultation has started with the Sechelt Nation but has now been put on hold.
“I don’t want to go into any detail there but we know that the Sechelt [Nation] at the moment are not administratively strong. They’re having some internal administrative and political difficulties and so it’s difficult for things to move forward. It’s also difficult to raise any blame on that.”
He said he’s been fielding lots of questions about the golf course lately and one misunderstanding that he wants to clear up is that of ownership.
“It surprises me that there’s still some concern in and around the community on that,” Milne said.
“The operations and the company side of the golf course has been privately owned since day one and most recently a family known as the Wangs, and I don’t know what the corporate structure is, but they purchased the property and the company and the golf course as we understand it, the operations, from Mr. and Mrs. Hall, who had been operating it prior to 2014, prior to when the District of Sechelt stepped in.”
The District of Sechelt took over operations of the golf course for about nine months in 2012 when the municipality claimed the Halls owed more than $190,000 in unpaid lease fees; however, the district never owned the company.
The district took a major financial hit when it took over control of the course, thanks in large part to the municipality entering into a lease agreement for new golf carts that Milne said were never used.
“Nobody wanted them. The golf course didn’t want to use them, the Wangs didn’t want to touch them because the lease payments were so high,” Milne said, adding that the district ultimately had to return the golf carts to the Calgary-based company they were leased from and take a loss of $143,307.60.
