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Member details plan presented to town council for Riverview Golf Club

Oct 26, 2018 | 5:05 PM

 

REDCLIFF, AB — Members of the Riverview Golf Club voted overwhelmingly last night to form a committee made up of town council members, club members and residents to try and save the club.

During the meeting, Richard Lant, a club member, spoke about the plan that they presented to council. He discussed the plan with CHAT News in more detail on Friday.

“There was a lot of restructuring that was going to be done,” he said. “We had put a plan forward to redo the bylaws, redo some of the procedures and the policies of the golf course, and present a financial position we’d be in five years.”

Lant says in the plan presented, the club would be at a break-even point, and would show a small profit in five years. The club would also run in a fiscal manner, and work to attract new members.

Lant adds the club asked the town to move debt of more than $100,000 it owed into a new loan which had a 15-year amortization period. The club was also hoping money for a driving range from the town would be used to help pay debt, and they were attempting to raise $100,000 from members.

“That would have given us enough to pay off our creditors, and it would’ve allowed us to start off the next year going forward, not back,” he said.

Lant adds during the meetings, the town wanted to see several things before they voted on funding. The recommendations included raising $50,000 from members, a five-year business plan and removing the current director of golf.

Lant says the board decided against removing the director of golf during a meeting earlier this month.

“We felt our most viable plan going forward was to stay with what we had, and with the restructuring we gave the town on employee files, bylaws, those types of things, we would address things as they happened,” he said.

The town voted down the plan to lend the golf course money when the meetings returned to open council. Mayor Dwight Kilpatrick, when asked by CHAT News on Thursday, said privacy reasons due to the in-camera nature of the meeting prevented him from speaking about what was discussed.

Lant said he didn’t intend the meeting to be a personal attack on Mayor Dwight Kilpatrick, and called him “a good man.”

He says he is hoping the discussions between the town and the course will be transparent moving forward.

“I don’t like the process, I’m not in favour of in-camera sessions, because they hide too much,” he said. “It should be out in the open. I tried to be as transparent as I possibly could.”

Lant added following the meeting Thursday night he had resigned from the board of the golf club.

“I think that me being on the board would be detrimental to the golf course, in what transpired tonight, so I resigned,” he said. “I did that for the good of the course.”