Buffalo Grove village board comes to aid of golf course restaurant
As the Buffalo Grove Golf Course's restaurant gets ready to tee off again in April, the village is helping it out of the rough.
The village board voted Monday to revise the five-year lease with the Wild Buffalo restaurant, waiving as much as $42,000 in outstanding rent from 2020 and reducing the monthly rent from $4,500 to $1,000 for the first three months of 2021.
Rent will revert to $4,500 a month at the beginning of April or May, depending on when the restaurant returns to full operation.
The restaurant has been closed since November, and before that was operating with limited capacity because of the pandemic.
The lease runs through 2021, but the restaurant's penalty for early termination was reduced from $165,000 to $65,000, which will be further reduced if the contract is extended at the end of the year.
The new agreement requires the restaurant to pay outstanding utility payments and food and beverage taxes.
The changes, which officials said came at the request of both village staff and the restaurant, also contain some benefits for the village.
Deputy Village Manager Christopher Stilling said if the restaurant defaults, the village will acquire at no cost all its fixtures, furnishings and equipment, together valued at about $100,000.
Also, the village's penalty for early termination of the lease was reduced from $500,000 to $200,000.
"We felt that as part of this negotiation, if we could reduce our termination penalty down to a much lesser number, in this case $200,000, that was a benefit to the village long term," Stilling said.
Village trustees approved the deal, although one said the agreement was more beneficial to the restaurant than village.
Trustee Gregory Pike said the new agreement could have reduced the number of automatic extensions to the lease. It currently calls for three automatic extensions of five years each.
"Obviously, the restaurant is having troubles, like most restaurants in the industry, but with the restructure of the lease agreement, this seems a little more one-sided, tilted towards the restaurant," he said.