It’s no longer “Fore” sale.
CGI St. Lucie has purchased the St. Lucie Trail Golf Club, 951 SW Country Club Drive, at Country Club Estates in St. Lucie West. The company also owns The Evergreen Club in Palm City.
“We closed it a week ago, March 30,” partner Tom DeShazo said in a telephone interview.
PGA put the facility up for sale last year. The St. Lucie West Services District was among the early lookers. PGA hesitated to sell the club outright to the district. The district put plans to build a new permanent office on Utilities Drive on hold as it looked into buying all or part of the St. Lucie Trail property instead.
CGI St. Lucie is talking with the services district to purchase part of the St. Lucie Trail property, including the 22,000-square-foot clubhouse and area for creating water-management projects that would help reduce flooding along Cashmere Boulevard between Heatherwood and St. Lucie West boulevards.
“They’ve agreed to buy from us the clubhouse, pool, tennis courts and 15 acres of the golf course,” DeShazo said.
The district and CGI said any proposed water-management projects will be incorporated into the golf course to keep its function and aesthetics intact.
The district’s board of supervisors had a special meeting on March 27 to discuss CGI St. Lucie’s offer; about 75 attended. The board gave the district’s manager and utilities director, Dennis Pickle, a nod to go forward with discussing CGI’s offer to sell that portion of St. Lucie Trail to it for $1.1 million.
DeShazo said there’ll be a lot of opportunities for club members to make their thoughts known as the proposed purchase goes forward. “We’re meeting with the tennis members to discuss the tennis and pool,” DeShazo said. “It’ll take a while for the deal to go down with the water district.”
In separate, earlier interviews, Pickle said the district hopes to sell or lease the tennis courts and pool to the Country Club Estates homeowners association. “Our desire would be to offer it to the HOA,” Pickle said. “We could look at either selling it to the community or leasing it to them on a long-term basis, so they could control their destiny.”
Pickle said the fastest conceivable timeframe for the district to close a deal with CGI St. Lucie is six months. Because the district is a municipal service district, it must have public hearings similarly to cities and counties. “All these things take time and have to be approved by the board at public hearings,” he said.
DeShazo said CGI will build another clubhouse when the district purchases the existing one.
Alix Dannewitz, vice president of CGI St. Lucie, said St. Lucie Trail will remain a semi-private club with memberships and opportunities for others to play at the 18-hole course.
“There’s an option to join our sister club, The Evergreen Club in Palm City,” Dannewitz said. “It’s a great benefit for golfers to have two clubs within 14 miles of each other and have some variety in the game.”
DeShazo said CGI and the services district have to and will listen to St. Lucie West and Treasure Coast residents as they go forward.
“You have to have support from the community to make any project work,” he said.