Ballard athletic club owner says he’s not strong-arming land sale

There is an effort by the leader of the Olympic Athletic Club to buy votes for a piece of land he’d like to purchase, but the health-club owner told KIRO Radio’s Dori Monson that it’s not as malicious as it sounds.

“We have been recruiting members; the Eagles (Athletic Club) want us to recruit members. They need members,” said Jim Riggle, owner of Olympic Athletic Club. “I can’t make anybody vote any one way. Some of the people that the opposition party has recruited has switched sides … I can’t control how somebody’s gonna vote.”

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Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat described some seemingly shady business going on at the Salmon Bay Eagle club in Ballard, as approximately 50 new members joined the 83-year-old club to vote on a $2.4 million land sale. The members came from the Olympic Athletic Club, located across the street, which wants to use the land to build a 400-space parking lot.

Club President James Forgette told Westneat, “People from the athletic club are becoming Eagles for the sole purpose of getting this land. They’re stacking the deck, and it’s working.”

Riggle, who says he’s been an Eagle for eight years, claims the property in question has six gas tanks that have been leaking for years. He says the Eagles don’t have the up to $1 million needed to clean up the mess and that his club has offered to take that liability off their hands. He says the notion that he’s trying to strong-arm the club into selling by planting members is misleading, seeing as the Board of Trustees voted 5-1 to sell the property.

“I think the column didn’t portray the reality of what’s going on there,” he says.

Riggle says that a flyer given to athletic club employees was indeed a recruiting effort and paying new members’ dues was an “employee benefit,” but it was also something the Eagles were aware of.

“It did not go out to members,” he said. “By the way, membership to the Eagles cost $36 a year, so we’re not talking about any substantial amount of money.”

Riggle also denied Forgette’s suggestion that the new members would never show up at the social club again.

“We hope that they do stay members of the Eagles and are active members,” he said. “… Any time anybody joins anything, you’re gonna lose some of them. They’re not all gonna stay there but the hope is that they do. They’re our neighbors; we’ve been neighbors for 35 years there. It’s to our benefit to have the Eagles be a healthy club.”

Despite the new members, Riggle says he is “not confident at all” that the land sale will go through.

“The opposition has brought in a lot of people and we may lose the vote,” he said. “And that would be really sad &#8212 sad for the Eagles, sad for the whole community, because the community needs parking and we need to clean that environmental mess up.”