Purchase of Harbour Pointe Golf Course stalled over parking lot

Published 9:00 pm Tuesday, August 22, 2006

MUKILTEO – Despite rumors to the contrary, the sale of Harbour Pointe Golf Course to former Microsoft executive and current golf entrepreneur Scott Oki is still pending.

This from Oki himself, who said Tuesday that “we remain very interested in the property.”

The proposed transaction, which has been in the works for several months, has been hung up by an unresolved parking matter. At issue is a small parcel of unpaved land next to the current parking lot and adjacent to the putting green, which is used for overflow parking at the golf course.

Oki had initially thought the parcel would be included in the sale, and when he learned it was not he pulled back to await a solution.

That was where the deal was almost two months ago and where it remains today.

“The parking issue is a deal breaker for us,” Oki said. “If we do not have parking, there goes the business. So for us, it’s pretty critical.”

Harbour Pointe Golf Course is owned by Golf Northwest, Inc., with former Everett mayor Ed Hansen the majority owner. The overflow parking area, however, is owned by Harbour Pointe Limited Partnership, the group that originally developed the entire Harbour Pointe community.

Hansen and his fellow owners have been “trying to work through how to mitigate the parking problem,” Oki said.

Two options have emerged. The most obvious would be the purchase of the overflow parking parcel so that it could be included in the sale. Of course, that raises the question of who pays for the purchase – Hansen and his group alone, or the sellers and Oki splitting the cost.

Another option would be to put additional parking where the ninth green is today, a plan that involves rerouting the ninth hole into a slightly shorter design to include a new green. According to Mark Rhodes, Harbour Pointe’s director of golf and a minority owner, talks have already started with the city of Mukilteo about possibly changing the course.

Contacted on Monday night, Hansen declined to comment. Rhodes, however, said Hansen sent Oki a proposal in early July about ways to bring the two sides together, “and when I talked to Ed two weeks ago, Scott had not responded back to the newest proposal. So Ed kind of thinks (the sale) is a dead-in-the-water deal.”

“If something has changed, I have not heard otherwise,” Rhodes went on. But the prevailing mood around the golf course is that “it’s not going anywhere. That’s how I see it and the staff sees it and the people who play golf there on a regular basis see it.”

Oki, who left Microsoft in 1992, has accumulated some of the premier golf properties in the Puget Sound area. His holdings include Snohomish’s Echo Falls Golf Club, Auburn’s Washington National Golf Club, Port Orchard’s Trophy Lake Golf and Casting, and the Golf Club at Newcastle.

To this portfolio Oki hopes to add Harbour Pointe, which is one of the top public courses in Snohomish County. For now, though, “I think it’s largely kind of in Ed’s ballpark to figure out how we can go forward on this,” he said. “He knows what our issues are. … We are waiting to hear of a solution.

“This is not something where we would say, ‘Oh, so what if we don’t have 60 parking spots. Let’s go ahead and buy it anyway.’ Well, we’re not going to do that.”

As the wait continues, Oki added, “there is no urgency from our perspective. We’re perfectly happy to close the deal tomorrow, or we’re perfectly happy to close the deal a year from now.”