Who In Their Right Mind Wants a 9 Hole Golf Course in Dowth Town Seattle?
The Seattle golf lobby, this is who!
Seattle’s golfers are upset that the city council is reviewing our 5 golf courses. I like golf courses! I ysed to walk our dog on a public golf course in Long Beach! (I carried the bays!) Without that golf curse. our area of Long Beach would be dreafdul carpet of tikki takki housing developments.
There is, however, a huge difference between a golf course in an area that is residential and the 9 holes of the Interbay facility along 15th Avenue.
As Seattle booms, the area along 15th, largely underused and with large spaces still left over from a prior life serving the Navy, is very much a part of DOWNTOWN. The entire area needs serious urban planning. More parkland? Mixed income housing along a very accessible boulevard leading in and out of Seattle? An urban bridge to Ballard? The biotech park that failed in SLU? A housing development built for bicycles?
Seattle regularly screws up urban planning. With the great exceptions of Seattle Center, the Pike Place Market, the Market Steps and our wonderful public parks, this city is a situation comedy where ugly buildings, a picayune central city plaza, a waterfront that makes me long for Atlantic City, and a lack of a single viable boulevard are a testimony to failure of the kind of leadership that built San Francisco, Boston, Paris, our neighbor Vancouver, or our little brother Portland.
Now we have yet another opportunity to replicate the great inner city suburban industrial park fiasco aka SLU. The corridor that connects Elliott Avenue and 15th Avenue to the new tunnel is amazing. Waterfront views along with a dodge podge of poorly used commercial property and unused former military property. That corridor goes North along Aurora to Everett and Soth to Tacoma, but in the middle is Seattle with opportunities to build a great city.
So, there is a 9 hole golf course there and, of course, the golf community has to fight. . I have no issue with golf courses of an opera house. I dom not use either one. BUT our boat lives at Shilshole. I get my bit too! But this seems to me to be a different issue. Golf courses are a sort of park, another use for green space just as a marina uses the shore. But Interbay? This 9 hole course is part of the last undeveloped area in Seattle. With good planning, Interbay could become a great neighborhood, with parkland, a downtown school, and access to the new waterfront.
Do it right! Create mixed use housing so ordinary folks can live along with better off folks willing to pay for the premium location.
It is time to use the Paris model of city planning. The governor will appoint a special city planner with wide and broad authority to create a city perhaps like the ones in a recent National Geographic. Lots of green spaces separating areas of towers for agriculture, industry and living. Little need for cars as you will walk or take public transportation between hubs. There won’t be just a 9 hole golf club it will be 18 holes, and with some help from Microsoft it will be a fantastic golf coast that includes building roofs, donut signs, islands, amazing water hazards and drones kidnapping golf balls and placing them in new places. Golfers may want to take a Mulligan as they are going to have a huge handicap.
There could be some non-profit chicanery going on here.
I was curious so I looked up Interbay Golf on the internet. I found that it is a gold course owned by the city and managed by Premier Golf Center LLC. A for profit corporation that manages a number of public gold courses here in Washington state including one up here in Bellingham.
Perusing the Interbay Golf web site I found that there is an Interbay Golf Cub. Looking further I found it is a non-profit golf club. It is listed on the Secretary of Washington State corporations as a non profit. What is odd is that the Articles of Incoporation show it as under the LLC which is very odd for a ny non profit corporation. I checked on the IRS site and Interbay Gold Club does not show up as a non-profit having received any tax exemption. So we could have a club that is really being operated for profit by the corLLC and there is nothing wrong with that if they are paying the proper taxes, but since they claim to be a non profit club that porabaly is not happening. Would anyone have any further information? I ay make a complain tot he IRS.