Donald Trump is coming out swinging at members of the historic Long Island Engineers Country Club who are trying to block his purchase of the property and its 18-hole golf course.
The real estate mogul is bidding to take over the 94-year-old club in Roslyn Harbor, LI, where more than 200 members have an equity ownership in the property.
“He wants to turn it into Trump National Golf Club Long Island,” sniffed one source.
The 17-member board of directors unanimously passed a motion to bring the estimated $10 million to $20 million deal before all their members for a vote expected next month.
But the Association for A Better Engineers (ABE), a group of the club’s older members, wrote to the directors demanding they limit the vote on Trump’s proposal to 122 “legacy” members. The ABE wants to exclude younger members who didn’t have voting rights until last fall, when some decided to buy full memberships.
Larry Hutcher, a lawyer for the ABE, told us, “These people shouldn’t be permitted to vote. The board proposes that they be permitted to do so. You can’t let people who have no vested interest in the club vote.”
He said the ABE members “want the club to remain an equity-owned club. Mr. Trump can promise gold fountains in the bathroom, gold waterfalls and perfectly cut blades of grass. It doesn’t matter, we don’t want it.”
But Trump responded to the uproar in his trademark style, telling Page Six, “Those people are losers who don’t want to see anything good happen. Those people aren’t looking for quality, and probably won’t be members for very long.”
Trump told us the deal “is going along very nicely. The members love the deal. The real question is whether or not I want to do the deal.”
Club president Robert Scheinman told us, “The board of directors has acted within the bylaws of the Engineers Country Club, and it’s my job as president to represent all members of the club.”