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Wednesday, December 19, 2018
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BEARS WANTED
Club West Golf Course put up for sale .3
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CHRISTMAS SPIRIT
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AT THE BIG TOP
BY PAUL MARYNIAK AFN Executive Editor
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hree months after regaining ownership of the Club West Golf Course, Wilson Gee has put it up for sale. Gee last Friday priced the course at $1 million – making it the cheaper of the two golf courses in Arizona currently on the market and one of 32 courses on sale in the country. The other, Sun Dance Golf Club in Buckeye, is selling for $2.5 million, but it was built in 2003 – 10 years after Club West was. Gee said he decided to sell the course be-
cause “I don’t think people there want me.” “Basically, I have no support,” he said, adding that he feels many of the HOA’s approximate 2,400 homeowners “don’t want me running things.” He also complained that the Foothills Club West Community Association board specifically wouldn’t work with him as he tried to put the course back in playing condition. “They said ‘you got to do this, got to do that.’ That’s why I decided it wasn’t worth it,” Gee said. “So, we’re looking at just selling,” he added. “I think price wise, it’s an attractive property.”
But Gee’s decision may be putting him on a collision course with the HOA board and their attorney, Tim Barnes – the same lawyer representing two Ahwatukee Lakes homeowners in their long-running lawsuit against him for letting that golf course run into ruin. The HOA in summer 2016 sued Gee over conditions of the course after he stopped watering it because he said he could not afford to pay city water bills that exceeded $700,000 a year. The HOA withdrew the suit last December See
WEST on page 8
Five visitors bring stress relief to Mt. Pointe students BY PAUL MARYNIAK AFN Executive Editor
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ATHLETES GIVE BACK
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ith end-of-the-semester exams piled atop Christmas shopping anxiety and all the other pressures at their age, Mountain Pointe High School juniors Alan Dupre and Lauren Young knew just the ticket to add some calming moments for their over-stressed classmates. They let the dogs out. They invited five therapy dogs last Wednesday into school, through Arizona State University’s Sun Devil Paws nonprofit as part of a project for their DECA chapter, an international student marketing club. The dogs – Valentino, a Mi-Ki; Betsy Ross, an English Crème Goldendoodle; Arrow, a border collie; Abby, an Old English sheep dog; and Dos, a Catahoula leopard mix – sat silently and nonchalantly in the school See
DOGS on page 14
(Kimberly Carrillo/AFN Staff Photographer)
Preparing to meet Mountain Pointe High School students were pet therapy handlers and their dogs, from left: Khara Fuentes with Tino; Angela Graczyk with Arrow; Jaime Larson with Dos; Sharon Martin with Abby and Cindy Jacques with Betsy Ross.
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