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AHWATUKEE FOOTHILLS NEWS www.ahwatukee.com
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Wednesday, March 21, 2018
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Money woes mount for Club West course owner
AHWATUKEE FOOTHILLS NEWS BY PAUL MARYNIAK AFN Executive Editor
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inancial woes are mounting for the beleaguered owner of the Club West Golf Course as the clubhouse restaurant closed by health inspectors and more than five dozen golfers are demanding the return of thousands of dollars in membership fees. Those problems come atop an investor’s efforts to determine how $350,000 of his money was spent by course owner Richard Breuninger, who bought the course in December after signing a $1.3 million note held by previous owner Wilson Gee. And they are in addition to more than $200,000 that Breuning and his company, Club West Golf Management, owe the Phoenix Water Services Department for delinquent water bills. Meanwhile, a lawyer for Club West Golf
AHWATUKEE FOOTHILLS NEWS SMALL PLACE, BIG DREAMS
(Tom Sanfilippo/Inside Out Aerial)
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COME AND GET IT
Almost all the green was gone last weekend on the Club West Golf Course as it neared a month since the city shut off service for delinquent bills amounting to several hundreds of thousands of dollars.
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CLUB WEST on page 14
Planning committee to vote on sober living restrictions BY PAUL MARYNIAK AFN Executive Editor
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ighter zoning controls to prevent the proliferation of unregulated “sober living homes” in Phoenix will come before the Ahwatukee Foothills Village Planning Committee Monday as it inches its way toward a final vote by City Council next month. Although a recommendation by the committee for the controls’ approval is not required for their adoption, the panel last month gave indications the new rules will easily get an OK when it meets at 6 p.m. March 26 at Pecos Community Center. City Councilman Sal DiCiccio pressed for the stricter regulations after Arcadia residents raised alarms about numerous sober living homes popping up in residential neighborhoods. These homes are not like licensed clinics and often provide no services or medical staff to their residents, he found. In addition to zoning regulations aimed at keeping these homes from infesting a neigh-
borhood, the Council also will be considering tough licensing requirements that would make it more difficult for these operations to simply provide a bed and collect thousands of dollars from government agencies and private insurers for so-called treatment of addictions. The new rules were fashioned in part with the help of nonprofits, such as the Salvation Army, that run legitimate treatment programs for addicts, DiCiccio said. The full extent of the problems that sober living homes are creating for homeowners was laid out at last month’s planning committee by Linda Colino, an Arcadia resident who helped organize residents to push for more city controls because the State Legislature only now is taking some small steps toward regulating the facilities. “We’re not trying to stop sober living homes from going their good work, but there are some bad operators,” said Colino, part of an organization called Take Action Phoenix. She found 13 houses within a quarter-mile of her neighborhood – and only four were
licensed by the state. Colino is no stranger to the sober living home scene. She said her son is a recovering addict and she spent $26,000 to have him treated in a sober living home, only to see him discharged “with no exit plan.” “All they wanted was more money,” she said. Spurred by lucrative federal government subsidies and medical insurance plans that do not require rigid treatment programs, the sober living homes have become a major problem in many parts of the state and nation. People have complained that the addicts and alcoholics who sleep there wander around their neighborhood and loiter outside all day and night because the group homes provide them with no programs and sometimes not even meals. Exacerbating the threat to quiet residential neighborhoods are sex offenders who also end up in the recovery homes. They are not See
SOBER on page 16