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AHWATUKEE FOOTHILLS NEWS www.ahwatukee.com
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Wednesday, June 6, 2018
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Pastor Don Schneider, an Ahwatukee titan, remembered
AHWATUKEE FOOTHILLS NEWS F BY PAUL MARYNIAK AFN Executive Editor
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amily and friends on Saturday will celebrate the life of the Rev. Don Schneider, the former pastor of Mountain View Lutheran Church whose contributions to the community for more than 30 years helped make Ahwatukee what it is today. Pastor Schneider died May 23 under hospice care in Ahwatukee. He was 87. A Celebration of Life will be held at 11 a.m. June 9 at Mountain View Lutheran, 11002 S. 48th St., Ahwatukee. To help the church plan for seating and lunch, attendees should contact (Special to AFN) info@mvlutheran.org, or cal 480-893-2579. Pastor Don Schneider, the retired leader of MounBorn and raised in Wisconsin, Pastor tain View Lutheran Church, was a larger-than-life Schneider began his service to God and man presence in Ahwatukee. well before he was ordained in 1956 in MilPastor Schneider also exhibited a golden waukee and long after he retired in 1996. Even before he finished Northwestern Lu- touch at fundraising – from founding and theran Seminary in Minneapolis, he led a developing the church campus of Prince of Danish Lutheran congregation; just four days Peace Lutheran in Northridge, California, his before his passing, he presided over his grand- first assignment shortly after ordination, to help pressure the City of Phoenix to estabson Jeremy’s wedding.
lish Ahwatukee’s first ballfields with the creation of Mountain Vista Park and, later, Pecos Community Center. He became pastor of Mountain View Lutheran in 1980, when it was the only church in Ahwatukee, and made it a launching pad of sorts for several other churches in the community, including Corpus Christi, by extending the use of its premises to their fledging congregations. The last charter member of the Ahwatukee Kiwanis Club, Pastor Schneider helped save the Ahwatukee Easter Parade when the Jaycees, which started it, could no longer continue the 42-year-old community event. Last year, he was the parade’s grand marshal and Parade Boss Mike Schmitt said at the time that he was “very deserving” of the honor. “Can you imagine the Saturday before Easter Sunday morning, your parking lot overrun by parade activities?” recalled AFN founder Clay Schad. “Pastor Schneider was right in there with Mike Schmitt and it got
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Judge again rules that Lakes golf course be restored BY JIM WALSH AFN Staff Writer
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Maricopa County Superior Court judge remained steadfast in a long-awaited ruling issued last week that orders the owner of the defunct Ahwatukee Lakes Golf Course to return the site to its original function. For the third time in two years, Judge John Hannah made it crystal clear to The True Life Companies that it must restore Ahwatukee’s best-known eyesore to a golf course. The rulings started when Hannah upheld the deed restrictions nearly two years ago and continued with his emphatic January verdict in a trial that a “material change’’ does not exist in the golf industry that would justify modifying the deed restrictions governing the 101-acre site. But Hannah also rejected a request from Lakes residents that he name a special master to supervise the course’s restoration. He also refused to rule that it be restored to the
same condition it was in before the water was turned off in 2013 by former owner Wilson Gee. “For now, the remedy will be limited to a straightforward mandatory injunction requiring the owner of the Ahwatukee Lakes Golf Course to operate a golf course on the property in conformity with the Declaration of Use Restriction’’ in the 1992 covenants, conditions and restrictions, Hannah wrote in a minute entry. However, nothing in the CC&Rs, which Hannah originally affirmed in a 2016 ruling, requires that the course return to the same layout and the same condition it was in five years ago, he wrote. “What the owner must do is to create and operate a golf course that is consistent with the reasonable expectations that The Lakes Golf Course created among the benefited home owners,’’ Hannah wrote. Tim Barnes, attorney for Linda Swain and Eileen Breslin, welcomed the ruling and said it would apply to anyone who owns the
course, whether that would be True Life, previous owner Wilson Gee or someone else. Gee has filed on a trustee sale on True Life’s unpaid $8.2 million note, with the payment due on Aug. 21. True Life bought the property with the intent to build an “agrihood,” that would include a five-acre farm, a private school and about 270 single and two-family homes. Just before the trial last October, it dropped the Ahwatukee Farms concept and offered to build a smaller par-3 golf course – as long as it could be ringer by the new houses. True Life and Gee both insisted during the trial that they have no intention of re-building a course on the site, saying that it not financially viable. Gee repeated that assertion in a recent interview with Ahwatukee Foothills News, saying the property would never be a golf course again and that housing would be the best use. Barnes disagrees, saying that a well-run See
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