Cycled past the building on the lake that now houses Grand Canyon University. Thinking how it would make a great community club. Maybe not as elegant as the defunct Chinese restaurant next to a gas station on Grand Ave.
Damn gang, you guys do know what buttons to push. Thanks fix, gives me another chance to climb on that soap box i so dearly love. The failure to buy the Lakes Club (where Grand Canyon University is) may well be the worst mistake the RCSC has ever made. It was for sale in 2001 when the property ran from Thunderbird to the Lake. The problem was the PIF had just been put in play the year before and they didn't have the money in hand. When i was on the board around 2012, the nursing school left and the owners/managers told us they were interested in selling it, but owed 3.2 million dollars on it and were not willing to lose money on it. Several of us on the board toured it and the consensus was it would take 3 million to get it into the shape we would want. That meant an investment of a max of 7 million dollars. One of the issues was the land it sits on was owned by the Sun Health Foundation with a land lease. They wanted 5000 sq feet for an office, but with 38,000 square, no big deal. After screwing around for about 5 months it became clear we had no real interest in it. The couple of us who thought it made sense were just being played for saps. The real tragedy is it would have changed Sun City as we know it. The massive community center could have housed the theater (there was already one there), the corporate offices, the visitor center, dozens of club rooms and coffee shops , ice cream parlor and even a small bar. The property along the lake is spectacular and would have made an outdoor area to die for. We would have owned all of the land from Eldorado to the lawn bowling greens and once the maintenance buildings were torn down a massive picnic area and walking paths would have become the go to place in Sun City. But alas, the golf course fix was in, huge amounts of money were being dedicated to them and no one was willing to slow down the process. Think of it this way: We simply would have had to move back the Willowbrook/Willowcreek project 5 years (courses by the way the PGA has told us don't need work yet) and built this project into the long range plan. Oh wait, we got rid of the long range planning committee back then and let the board/management team decide how to spend the money and what mattered in our future. Worse yet, as a board we were told not to talk about it. Want to have even more fun? Extend this out and think about if we didn't have to build a theater at Mountainview (because we had one 5 years earlier) and could just redo the pool and fitness area there. And, because we had 38,000 square feet on the lake, we wouldn't have run out and spend $750,000 on the land on Grand Ave. And, that's to say nothing of the additional 7 to 8 million dollars we are going to dump into it before we are done...with only a fraction of the space and left as i am told, entirely open access without perimeter fencing. And then people wonder why i get half crazed when talking about Sun City.
What makes this all so sinister was the action to remove the long range planning committee from any inclusion in how the PIF money was being allocated towards golf initially and then when that wasn't adequate, they kicked them to the curb completely. My argument was the entirety of any effort to build for the future should be a comprehensive examination of what our needs were currently and into the future as those needs evolved. Instead, we had a board president brazenly tell us we didn't need a long range planning committee because we had one...it was called the board of directors. Duh, there is no better example of why this is such a cluster-flock. Hit and miss, no real structure, just boards throwing stuff at the wall and hoping it works. And let's be honest, golf was the sole beneficiary. I've written often about John Meeker and his brilliance. There's any number of examples, but the one that stands head and shoulders above all others was his passion for understanding what Sun City residents wanted/needed. He listened to them and that became his roadmap for developing Sun City. It's exactly why i have been so critical of the board/management moving away fro community input and thinking they had all the answers. The minute any one person thinks they know it all, they have set themselves up to fail.
