Edina Country Club Building Sold To Pay Off Debt
Edina Country Club Building Sold To Pay Off Debt
By Echo Menges
According to a country club representative the Knox County Community Development Corporation has purchased the Edina Country Club building.
“The Board decided not to reopen back in March and then the membership gave the board the authority to liquidate it,” said country club representative Jeff Doss.
“It was brought to the Community Development Board and they unanimously decided to go ahead and purchase the country club’s assets for the amount owed, which was just a little over twenty thousand dollars. It wasn’t a whim. We looked at it and talked about it for a couple of months,” said Knox County Community Development Corporation Board President John Bode.
According to Bode the Edina Country Club owed money to several local businesses, which they could not afford to pay. The decision to buy the building was based on the loss those local businesses would have to incur.
“They owed a good amount of money to several local businesses that would have ended up hurting those businesses had we not stepped in,” said Bode. “We bought the building and the contents and all the equipment. We did not purchase the lease they had for the golf course. The City of Edina owns all the land out there we just bought the building. All our transactions were with the Edina County Club not the city.”
Bode credits KCCDC’s ability to step in and purchase the country club’s building, thus alleviating the club’s unpaid debts, to the fact that they have satisfied their own debts.
When KCCDC began the business of community development it was with U.S. Department of Agriculture loan money. Since the organization satisfied that debt, with money to spare, the limits on what they were allowed to do lessened.
“As long as we had a loan outstanding with USDA there were several stipulations and significant amounts of paperwork that were
required so to make the money more readily available for projects that were needed we decided to pay off the balance of the USDA loan,” said Bode.
“We started with nothing and came out with about a half a million dollars in assets. Now in addition to the business loans we have money we can use for projects in the community such as the country club building. Our intent in buying it was to help the country club get out of their indebtedness. We plan to fix up the building and make it available for the community to use until another opportunity is presented.”
