If you’re looking to get in a few rounds at the Sagebrush Golf Course sometime this golfing season, you’ll have to wait until next year.

The award-winning golf course will not be opening its doors as it will be too late in the year before they receive a building permit to modify their bed-and-breakfast style cottages required under their new zoning.

“It’s just too late,” Sagebrush president Bob Garnett said. “If we got the permit tomorrow it would still be three to four weeks of construction. That takes us to the middle of September [and] we’ll be closed [in] the middle of October. There’s no possible way you’d open for four weeks.”

The course didn’t open this past spring because the Thompson-Nicola Regional District (TNRD) required its bed-and-breakfast cottages be rezoned from residential to commercial zoning.

That rezoning process was completed at the end of May.

Construction can’t begin until the permit is received, and the owners have had no interest in opening just the golf course this year without being able to rent out the cottages.

Having lost money for years, the course lost approximately $1 million last year, and Garnett said if Sagebrush opened this year without the use of those facilities, an additional $400,000 of revenue would have been lost.

A silver lining from the owners’ perspective is they will be saving some hundreds of thousands of dollars from not opening the course at all this year, Garnett said.

The course was projected to lose a little less than $1 million this year had there been no rezoning hiccup.

He said that without having a clubhouse in place, Sagebrush hasn’t been able to attract the number of golfers they’d like to bring in, nor has it been able to attract families.

“Unless you’re a golfer, there’s nothing to do up there,” Garnett said.

With a clubhouse in place there would be amenities such as a pool and spa, and a range of activities, he said.

No clubhouse has hindered Sagebrush’s ability to stay out of the red, Garnett said.

The current owners didn’t have sufficient funds to build a clubhouse when the course was created.

“It ended up costing more for the infrastructure for the roads and lots and the golf course than originally anticipated and there wasn’t enough left to build the clubhouse,” Garnett said.

For the past two years, the current owners, Four for Fore Investments Ltd., have been searching for a new owner who could finish off the envisioned course.

The current owners also vowed not to open the course this year until they could find that new owner.

There are currently two prospective buyers lined up, and both have plans to building a clubhouse much bigger than what the current owners originally anticipated, Garnett said.

“We have two groups very interested, but they want this building permit done before they’ll finalize their deal,” Garnett said.

Until that is in place, the interested parties can’t evaluate what the course is worth to them, he said.

“We’ve always anticipated that as soon as we got the building permit we can sit down with these two people that are interested and one of them will step up and close and we move forward,” Garnett said.

The TNRD said they are in the process of issuing the building permit.