A couple hundred people in the former indoor arena of the Quentin Riding Club watched as the historic facility was auctioned on July 13. The bidding started at one million dollars, above the minimum of $950,000—the club’s total indebtedness. It continued as multiple bidders, including one bidding by phone, raised the price to $2.1 million. The gavel fell to a local developer, who outbid at least one other bidder who was trying to preserve it as an equestrian center. The winning bidder, Louis Hurst of Alden Management Co., Inc., developed the nearby retirement community, Alden Place.
Once a premier horse show facility that in 2000 hosted 16 multi-day rated shows and many smaller ones, the club has fallen into disrepair. The ring where countless champions were crowned is overgrown. Roofs are in disrepair. Paint is peeling. The Clubhouse is closed. From more than 600 members the number has fallen to 85 to 100, leadership said.
Days before the July 13 auction QRC attorney Ken Sandoe said, “The bank is pressing for foreclosure and the tax authorities are pressing for a tax sale. That stuff is going to happen within the next 60 to 90 days. We gotta sell it, get the money to pay them off, get them off our backs. They came to me at the eleventh hour. Those sales could happen as early as August or September so we need to move.”
Greg Shaffer is the current QRC president. “I started as a volunteer in 2016,” Shaffer said, after returning from Afghanistan as a disabled vet. He became president in 2018. “I came here as a child. It had such mystique. It was like the shining castle on the hill. To get to be a member was really special.”
More recently, “We couldn’t get help. The club was run by all volunteers. Our indebtedness was growing every day,” he said. He recalls keeping the 46 acres mowed with a riding mower because they couldn’t afford to fix the tractor. A local farmer baled the fields and split the hay with the club. Throwing the bales into the hayloft worsened his Multiple Sclerosis and helped confine him to a wheelchair 70 percent of the time, he said.
“We closed the clubhouse in October because the overhead was more than the revenue. We had to get rid of the horses in November when we lost our insurance.”
Did it Have to Be This Way?
The interest from the equestrian community to keep QRC in equestrian use never flagged. One couple at the July 13 auction bid the price to $1.5 million before dropping out. They wanted it as a training facility for their son.
In August 2018, as the Lebanon County Tax Bureau announced the property would be auctioned in September to satisfy nearly $100,000 in back taxes, the membership voted to sell the club to an investor group for which Alisa Pitt was the spokesperson. The group planned to take care of deferred maintenance and make it as available to the public as zoning permitted. Their original plans included a boarding, lesson and training facility with the clubhouse becoming a public restaurant.
Pitt told East Coast Equestrian the initial price of $600,000 increased to $700,000 when more debts were discovered. She said their request to examine the club’s books was denied and shortly after their phone calls went unreturned.
Shaffer called their proposal “beautiful” and said he and others politicked for it. “In our thought it was the best that we could foresee. They had a group of established equine professionals with a clear, precise proposal to get the showgrounds back up to par. The deal that was struck was we’d sell to them for the indebtedness. The other proviso was a deed restriction to keep it equine in perpetuity. The vote was resounding in their favor.
“I told them we are accruing interest daily. The figures I give you today are not going to be the figures next week. The interest rate rose because we were so far behind with the bank. The water authority and power company sued so we had their accruing attorney fees as well.”
He said the group, reformed with different principal investors, was turned down by at least one bank before they got approval for an $800,000 loan, $50,000 less than the indebtedness at that time. (It later grew to $950,000.) More importantly, the bank would not agree to the deed restriction mandating the property remain in equestrian use because it lowered the useful value of the property, he said.
“Our attorney advised us not to sign the agreement. We would have been locked into the sale at a price that did not pay everyone who was owed money.” Club members who paid bills when there were no funds to pay them are owed tens of thousands of dollars. “We would have been on the hook for the remaining $50,000. Some of those loans were already in the court system.
“Had we signed the agreement we would have willfully passed on paying people what they are owed. We would have opened ourselves to legal action. I don’t know whether our insurance would have covered that willful act. The personal assets of many board members, who are not millionaires but retirees, small business owners, could have been at risk.
“It was sad but it was the most responsible decision.
“Our former attorney, I don’t want to say he flat out quit but he basically said, ‘I didn’t sign up for this’. The purchase agreement was too open ended, there was no guarantee without the deed restriction that the property would remain equestrian. They could try for two years and sell for the same $2.1 million. Our creditors would be out and we would still be facing litigation for the debts we owed.
“While a few members knew Alisa or her parents, we had no knowledge other than her word (that she had the financial wherewithal to accomplish what she proposed.) And she would not divulge who her investors were, which is what raised many of the questions in August. All we had was the word of a stranger.
Books Held Hostage
“Allegations have been made that we were keeping the financial records secret and not allowing access to the books. That is in a sense true,” Shaffer continued. “I couldn’t even get ahold of the books. Our former secretary/treasurer, who was also the club manager, was being cagey about the books, the numbers and the files. That has turned into a completely separate hellacious issue.”
Shaffer said the club went from a full board in February 2018 to being one member away from being unable to field a quorum. Without a quorum any action is impossible. He described desperately trying to recruit occasional club diners to join the board.
“Last October a new member became treasurer and he’s been trying since November to get the books. Every time we tried to get records, we heard, ‘oh they’re at my house’. Why? It’s not that the club office isn’t secure. The two locks are different from each other and from every other lock in the clubhouse. Then it was ‘the hard drive on the computer is messed up and we can’t access it’. And ‘the records I do have are mine, not the club’s’. Then we offered to come by and pick them up. The response was, ‘if you set foot on my property I’m calling the police to have you arrested for trespass’. They have retained a lawyer,” Shaffer said.
“If this individual does have the club records why are they so adamant about not giving them back?” Shaffer asked. He said he would like to use some of the proceeds of the sale to conduct a forensic audit.
Gary Ziffer, a Lancaster, PA, CPA, specializes in forensic accounting and litigation support. His take? “That doesn’t sound too kosher. They should probably contact the Pennsylvania Secretary of State’s office that deals with charitable organizations. They may suggest calling the Pennsylvania State Police. I’ve done that in commercial settings where there’s been a dispute and someone’s holding the records. I think something needs to be done because that just doesn’t seem right.”
Social vs. Equestrian
The intersection between equestrian members and social members can become a minefield. At first it may be a relief to have social members take on some of the work, decisions, fundraising, communications. But equestrian members have a lifestyle invested--multiple horses, trucks, trailers, tack, farms—tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of long term investment, along with countless hours of work. Social members have an investment of, maybe, a few hundred dollars a year. If they don’t like how things are going, it’s simple to walk away.
Not so for equestrians. When social members are the leadership, decisions that affect the horsemen are not always made with them in mind. It’s safe to say that’s what happened here.
“There’s always been a rift between the clubhouse people and equestrian people,” Shaffer said. “The number of equestrians who were members recently was very few.”
Sylvia Eckenrode was a QRC board member from approximately 1993 to 2007 and vice president her last year on the board.
She ran the profitable fun show series and has held nearly every horse show position that exists. She still serves as secretary for shows. During her time on the board the horse shows brought in hundreds of thousands of dollars each year, she said.
To keep costs down, she, her family, the president and two employees did almost all the work related to the shows and the Quentin grounds themselves. “We hired temps, six guys for 8 hours, only once when we had 450 stalls to clean in 24 hours. Otherwise we did it all ourselves. The money we saved provided a good cushion for the club to run from October to April” when there were no shows and the club could run as much as $8,000 to $10,000 a month in the red.
Burnt out and feeling unappreciated, she and the president at the time both resigned about 12 years ago. The club had almost $100,000 in the bank.
During her tenure the board was composed mainly of horse people. “When we went off the board, it became mainly social members. They weren’t concerned with how the facility looked. There was no interest in maintenance. No one understood how to dress the rings, how to care for them. How to work the main ring to deal with the drainage system. Or how to maintain the two outside rings so that when there’s a heavy rain, the footing doesn’t wash away into the creek.
“The shows were disappointed with how the club looked, with the footing. They’d say if you want us to come back you need to make these changes. (Club leadership) didn’t attempt to get anyone in who knew about these things. That’s why they started losing shows.
“One show offered to pay to have the electric upgraded in some of the barns if they were given a discount on the rental fee,” she said. “The response was no. Another manager offered to provide additional footing for the rings if the rental for their show was discounted. They wouldn’t do it. Another offer was from a manager who runs ten successful shows a year, many of them rated. She had her own footing and offered to sell it to Quentin. The offer was, ‘You buy my footing and I will relocate all my shows from my facility to Quentin. All you have to do is get the footing in those rings taken care of because what’s there now can’t be ridden on.’ She met with the president and they couldn’t do it.”
In 2014 QRC hired the manager of Swan Lake’s horse shows to manage the club’s signature event, the Quentin Fall Show, held each Labor Day weekend since 1934. “His agenda was to move it to Swan Lake,” Eckenrode said. In 2015, it did. She recalled it was around the same time the club turned down the footing offer.
Eckenrode said she understood the club sold the Fall show dates for between $125,000 and $150,000.
“What happened to that money?” she asked. “At that point they were down to one employee. The next president, a social member, did no campaigning to keep the few boarders that remained. Without the shows, the club became a black hole.
“Every member should have been asking for a financial report. We provided financial reports for the annual meeting every year,” she said.
Ten Years Ago
Louise Serio is owner of Derbydown in Kennett Square, PA and one of the country’s top professional hunter riders.
“Ten years ago at least, we had a group that tried to have conversation with (QRC leadership) about purchasing the property. We might have had one conversation. They wouldn’t respond,” she said. “We even told them at one point we didn’t want the clubhouse, we just wanted the facility. It was just me leaving messages most of the time.
“Honestly they just didn’t want to have anything to do with it. This was before it was in trouble. The facility wasn’t very nice but I wasn’t aware there was debt. But again we really couldn’t get any information.
“If I remember correctly we were going to fix it up and have not just horse shows but other events but mainly have a nice show facility. I’m not surprised it sold for development but It’s a shame. Now ten years later we’re too old and tired to take on something that big.
“I did talk to someone a year or so ago, maybe the president, actually he contacted me about getting some interest back up, and I spent some time on the phone with him then. But again, ten years older and more millions to go into that place. I mean it’s falling down.”
Last Ditch Attempt
A local couple who do not want their names used made a last ditch effort to purchase the QRC just months before the sale.
“We were going to make it more of a ranch horse facility, set up obstacle courses, allow overnight camping so people could trail ride. We’d have let the restaurant run. We don’t have any western facilities locally. We never got far enough to say this is exactly what we’re going to do,” one said.
“Our lawyer contacted their lawyer to try to understand what was going on there and they really did not help us in any way. My husband then tried to talk to some of the club members, to tell them what we were into. Some club members came back and tried to be helpful. He wanted to go to the final meeting; they told him he couldn’t go.
“This was in May and June of this year. Everything we did we hit a roadblock. There was no opening there whatsoever. We quit. It seemed to us it was already sold, that what they were doing was just a formality.
“We had the financing to offer a million dollars. We own our facility free and clear, we’ve been here for 30 years, so I told (the bank) what we were going to do and they said we’re ready. But there were too many variables as far as what was going to get paid, what wasn’t going to get paid. There were too many loans and we were concerned they wouldn’t settle them and we would be stuck with them.
“There’s just a whole lot of things there that made you go huh? That’s why my lawyer told us to stay away. When they came back and said this is the date of our sale, my husband said, we don’t have enough time to do enough research to go ahead and really push them. So we backed off and that was the end of that.”
“I got a call and discussed it with the board,” Shaffer said in reply. “We had had already accepted the other proposal, but I knew they were having issues with funding and I suggested they see if they could work together. I can’t just make the decision myself; it has to go before membership. I never heard back again.”
What Happens to the Money?
QRC attorney Ken Sandoe said, “There’s a tremendous amount of misinformation out there. The Quentin Riding Club, a nonprofit corporation, is the owner. The members own it. Once all debts are paid, not just the judgements, mortgages, there were loans made by a lot of the members, whatever is left over is divided among the existing and up to date valid members of the nonprofit corporation.”
The club’s liquor license can only be sold to another social club. An auction of contents will be held onsite on August 13.