Archie Lang, the former Community Services minister who backed the covert bailout of the Mountain View Golf Club in 2011, refused to answer questions around the agreement when approached by the Star this week.

Meanwhile, the two heads of Whitehorse’s rival golf courses gave opposing views of how the deal was handled.

The controversy ignited in the legislature Wednesday after the NDP revealed the previous Yukon Party government paid $750,000 to quietly buy back its own land, leased by Mountain View in 1997.

“I don’t have anything new on that,” Lang said outside the legislature Thursday afternoon when when the Star asked him to discuss the issue.

“Maybe the next time I get elected.”

Lang repeated the line as he hurried toward the building entrance and disappeared down a flight of stairs.

The government stated in internal documents it had the city’s support for the buyback and wanted the riverside property for future lot development in the Whistle Bend subdivision.

The agreement, which allowed the non-profit golf club to eliminate its sizable debt, went through despite city officials’ express disinterest in expanding Whistle Bend via the Mountain View lands.

A feasibility study also noted much of the 51-hectare parcel was unsuitable for development.

“It was a coverup. There’s no two ways about it,” said Jeff Luehmann, who owns Meadow Lakes Golf and Country Club and uncovered documents and correspondence related to the buyback under access-to-information laws.

“They (Mountain View) didn’t do anything wrong; it’s the government.”

Lang was looking to “help” Mountain View, according to an email chain between several top civil servants.

“I should add that I just had a call from Minister Lang’s office inquiring about ... the issue of how we could help the Golf Course,” wrote now-retired top administrator Ray Hayes to both the deputy minister and assistant deputy minister of sustainable resources at Energy, Mines and Resources (EMR) in June 2010.

“The premise here is to deal with the (Mountain View) debt load,” EMR’s planning and development manager stated in a July 2010 letter to the assistant deputy minister.

That “premise” is not the one that would be presented to the public, however.

An EMR “alert” from Oct. 8, 2013 — approved by the deputy minister and prompted by questions from Luehmann — states that “suggested responses” to “public or media inquiry” read as follows: “this land was a prime location for the future expansion of the Whistle Bend residential project” and the buyback had “support from the City of Whitehorse.”

Both those assertions go against the grain of government correspondence as well as the city’s view that changes to the Whistle Bend subdivision plan seemed to “accommodate the Golf Course at the expense of the development.

“I have heard various reasons but one is clear in that it is coming from the top down,” according to a June 2010 email from a city official to the Community Services deputy minister.

“The whole thing does not make a lot of sense to me. What we have said is if changes are requested then YG should request them through City Council.”

Luehmann pointed to the Mount Sima ski hill, another non-profit that got a cash boost from the government when it found itself in dire financial straits in 2013.

“They got raked over the coals,” he pointed out.

“They had to open up their books. They had to drum up all kinds of support and plead with the government in the open.”

The 20-year-old ski operation was slated to close last year due to financial problems until the Friends of Mount Sima group formed to draw funding from the Yukon government and the city to pay off its debts.

In a flurry of public support, skiers pledged to buy 800 season passes, along with other donations, in late October 2013.

That gave the society’s board fully half the money it needed to run the hill for the entire season, about $500,000 — precisely the same amount Mountain View received from the government behind closed doors to pay off its own debt (the remaining $250,000 it was allowed to keep for itself).

“Even if they were in the right to do what they did, they still circumvented all those steps by the city,” Luehmann said of the government regarding Mountain View.

Tom Amson, president of the Mountain View non-profit society when the lease buyback went through, described the deal as “a great thing” spun as “something ugly.

“It basically saved the golf course. So if people don’t want the golf course, I guess it’s a bad thing. I don’t see anything that was underhanded.”

Amson noted the course costs about $850,000 a year to operate and maintain.

“We were going to go under because we had incurred debt and we were having trouble paying wages and servicing the debt,” he said in an interview Thursday.

He attributed the liability in part to “bad management” — “we had a couple bad managers who stole, basically.”

Mountain View’s annual summer pro-amateur charity event has raised about $300,000 for the Yukon Hospital Foundation’s cancer fund over the past four years, Amson added.

“I put 17 years of my life into that golf course, and for somebody to try to smear it pisses me off, to put it mildly. There’s a lot of people that have volunteered their time and effort, monumental effort.”

Scott Kent, the EMR minister, and Brad Cathers, the Community Services minister, said helping out Mountain View was no different than assisting any other non-profit and paved the way to expand Whistle Bend in the future.

“What we’ve seen with this is a case of the government of the day working to meet the express needs of Yukoners at that time,” Kent told the Star Thursday.

He recalled the heavy pressure on governments to stimulate home building in 2010, with the Whitehorse Chamber of Commerce and the Yukon Real Estate Association “clamouring for developable lots around the territory.

“It’s an incredibly important piece of recreational infrastructure to this territory,” he added of the golf club.

Kent cited non-profit societies that have received last-minute financial help in the past like the Fetal Alcohol Syndrome Society Yukon (FASSY), the Mae Bachur Animal Shelter and the Yukon Family Literacy Centre.

Cathers noted that neither he nor Scott were cabinet members when the lease buyback occurred. Cathers had left the caucus to sit as an independent after a fallout with then-premier Dennis Fentie.

“It appears that this was done both for the purposes of installing storm water drainage system and a perimeter trail (around Whistle Bend), as well as ... funding to address (Mountain View’s) mortgage.”

Cathers added he was continuing to talk with officials to get more information on the deal.

Nowhere in the 2010-11 supplementary budget is the $750,000 buyback identifiable, though much smaller capital expenditures — adding up to $54 million and $5.5 million in Community Services and EMR, respectively — are listed.

A feasibility study from December 2010 stated less than 60 per cent of the 51-hectare parcel was suitable for development.

Even within the available 30-hectare area, “limitations” like “site servicing” via well and septic systems, among other obstacles, were noted.

See editorial.