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APRIL 4, 2018 | AHWATUKEE FOOTHILLS NEWS
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tions to golf club members last week that Club West Golf Management paid Breuninger’s Inter Tribal Golf Association $208,000 for unspecified expenses. “That’s entirely wrong,” he said, adding that he has had forensic accountants poring over the records that he says Jones left in shambles. “Only $36,000 went to ITGA and it was not in a lump sum,” he said. One financial expert working with Breuninger is Eric S. Trevan, a national advocate for entrepreneurial and economic development and for small, minority, and Native American businesses. Breuninger, whose father is a member of the Oneida tribe in Wisconsin, said “red flags” started going up shortly after the holidays. He said he was receiving no city water bills and then learned that the Phoenix Water Services Department was sending five separate bills – one for each of the meters tied to Club West Golf Course – to five different addresses that “had no physical location.” Once he had the department send them all to his clubhouse restaurant, he began getting past-due notices.
‘Water’s the key element’
While that was going on, Breuninger said, he also was trying to untangle a network of vendors that Gee had contracted with through Foothills Golf Group. Gee owns the Foothills Golf Course and through that company, Breuninger said, had made expensive deals with Yamaha for golf carts and for other things like clothing and equipment. He said he started using a cheaper golf cart supplier and that Yamaha took away their vehicles as a result. Throughout this time, Breuninger said, his crew of about 45 employees continued trying to maintain the course. That payroll has now been reduced by more than
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“I didn’t see any performance report from Club West Golf Management until mid-January,” he said, adding that he had no idea of the extent of the company’s financial disarray until February. “Christa stopped coming to work, so I went into her office and discovered a pile of bills on her desk. Our hair was on fire trying to solve all the problems,” he said. As his accountants pieced together a financial history of Club West Golf Management’s activities, he added, “We were holding our breath waiting to see what they found out.”
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half, he said. Even though water service is shut down, he said, some of his employees figured a way to transport water from the small lake near the clubhouse so they could irrigate the course’s greens. Stating he understands that Day “has an investment to protect,” Breuninger said, “I have a golf course to protect.” Breuninger stressed that no money came in a lump sum, adding that members’ fees slowly came in over over a period of six or seven weeks. “It wasn’t like we had $250,000 all of a sudden,” he said. He is still hopeful he can arrange more favorable financing, but said that’s been difficult to get because the financial records were in such disarray and because the course will show an operating loss until a new golfing season begins in the fall. He also said he is continuing to work on a solution to the course’s biggest problem – a source for cheaper water. “Water’s the key element,” he said. “That defines whether we are successful. My original discussion with everybody was that we had an ongoing solution to the water problem.” At the same time, he said, he intends to honor his debt to the approximate 60 golfers who spent a total $250,000 on membership in a semi-private club he
started at Club West last fall. “We want those members to stay,” he said, adding that he envisions giving them free golf till the end of next year. “I’m trying to do what I can as a responsible owner to make sure the people who signed up for memberships are treated fairly,” he said. At the same time, he said, “people are offering me deals to bail.” That is as much an impossibility, he said, as any suggestion he has profited from his ownership of the course. Noting that he lives with his mother in the Quail Landing Apartments in Ahwatukee, he said: “Do you honestly think I am trying to run away with money? What money?” “There are still all kinds of things I want to do for our community, great things like an Oktoberfest, a farmers’ market. I’m not running away from anything. I’m the one who’s still making sure that whatever we have left as far as resources go go into that golf course.” “You can speculate until you’re blue in the face about what happened to the money and if you saw me driving up in a Ferrari with diamonds on my fingers and flashy new clothes, I could see where you’d get the idea I profited from this. But I’m not that kind of guy.”
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