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Currents. 7B¸A / AE7<5 B67<5 Tim Houchin tees off on hole 6 at the city-owned De Laveaga Golf Course.

Matters of Course

Economic downturn may force city to relinquish once-profitable golf course

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which tacked on an extra $250,000 in annual repayments and killed revenues by turning the course into a ghost town for 18 months while the repairs took place. By 2006, De Laveaga had begun recovering. Revenues climbed back to “normal� levels of roughly $2 million per year, and by mid-2008 it looked like the course would pay itself off after all. Then, last year, thanks mostly to the recession and a nationwide slump in golf play, the course saw its out-of-county clientele drop from 60 to 40 percent and its revenues drop by roughly a half-million dollars. Santa Cruz City Manager Dick Wilson says he thinks the course could rebound, but until the recession lifts he says he won’t know for sure. “We’ve always had the working assumption that the course would work financially,� says Wilson. “But the industry has changed too, and the fact is that there are too many golf courses with too few golfers playing too few rounds. The market will recover somewhat, but until we know how much it will recover, I just don’t know the answer to most of

the questions out there.� Meanwhile, Santa Cruz Parks and Recreation Director Dannette Shoemaker has six months to investigate options for outsourcing the course before the City Council takes action. “If I had my druthers, it would definitely stay as a municipal golf course,� she says. “We’ve just had some things come up that are outside of our control, and citywide we’re in a terrible spot financially—though I’d still say there is enough concern from residents and councilmembers that the jury is still out. I’m going to do my darnedest to keep the course as it is.�

Par for the Course There’s nothing new about cities outsourcing the management of golf courses. San Francisco has been considering it for 10 years, Pacific Grove came close very recently and Salinas went through with the idea two years ago. So what changes could the golfing community expect if the course is

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OU COULD play dozens of public golf courses in America and be hard pressed to find one better maintained than Santa Cruz’s city-owned De Laveaga Golf Course. With 6,010 yards of expertly manicured fairways and greens that you could eat eggs off of, the course is the handiwork of a top-notch, well-paid group of unionized golf course professionals. So since June 8, when city leaders announced they would look into possibly outsourcing the course’s business operations to a private management company, more than a few club swingers have been calling for a mulligan. “This is the best muni course in the nation,� says Santa Cruz golfer Larry Keast

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after teeing off a rocket drive on hole 1. “If they privatize it they’re gonna bring someone in for a lot less money that may not know a thing about golf course maintenance. What these guys do here is a science.� Science, however, is expensive. And De Laveaga has lost more than $2.5 million over the last five years. The losses aren’t necessarily the fault of overpaid workers, although full-time labor accounts for the biggest figure on the course’s expense sheet—$662,000 of the last fiscal year’s $2.2 million in expenses. In fact, until five years ago, the golf course ran steadily in the black. It was even saving some extra profit in a rainy day fund. But in 2005, the city spent some $2.3 million on a near-complete renovation of the course,

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