Council sets parameters for future operation of golf course

By Mike Rauck

The city gave Emerald Golf Management until Friday to accept the city’s terms for management of the Bowie Golf Club.  If an agreement can’t be reached, the city will attempt to negotiate a contract with Indigo Golf Partners.

The council also directed the city manager to make all practical efforts to open the facility using contractors and city staff while negotiations continue.

The Bowie Golf Club closed Friday after the city was not able to reach an agreement with Emerald to operate the city-owned facility.  A prior agreement with Bowie Golf Course Management expired last Thursday.

An RFP process earlier in the year yielded two proposals to manage the golf course.  City staff recommended a proposal from Indigo Golf Partners, but the council voted to pursue an agreement with Emerald.

Shirley Fletcher, president of Emerald Golf Management, addressed the council during the citizen participation portion of last night’s city council meeting.  Fletcher was unhappy with the way the city handled negotiations, but she let the council know that Emerald is still interested in running the facility.  

“We’re still here.  We still want to run and operate the Bowie golf course,” Fletcher said.  We still believe that we’re a good fit. We’re local.  We’re small business, and I think we’ll do the community a good job.  The city will be very pleased with what we can do.”

District 1 Councilmember Michael Estève indicated that the council has some non-negotiable terms that Emerald was not able to meet.  “The final offer we received included illusions to some of the things that we wanted, but a lot of it was not in writing,” Estève said.

Estève said that he did not want to make the same mistakes that were made in the agreement with the previous management firm, Bowie Golf Course Management.  “We discovered over time that much of our relationship with the previous company was largely built on trust.”  Estève continued, “If we are going to invest a very large amount of public tax dollars into the course over the next several years, we want to make sure that there is 100% absolute financial transparency and accountability.  We wanted to make sure in writing that the city council would have the final say over rates, and that we would be able to keep rates low.”

District 2 Councilmember Dufour Woolfley proposed that city staff permanently run the golf course as a last resort if an agreement cannot be reached with Emerald or Indigo Golf Partners.  He received pushback from At-Large Councilmember Ingrid Harrison and District 4 Councilmember Roxy Ndebumadu, and the council agreed to take action at a later date if an agreement with a management company cannot be reached.

According to Assistant City Manager Daniel Mears, the golf course remains closed, and eight contractors have been hired to maintain the facility.  Crews were present at the course this morning.

Estève spent about seven minutes during last night’s meeting providing a thorough and detailed explanation of his position on the golf course.  His comments are well worth the read, and they can be found below.

So first off, I think I can safely say that all seven of us on the city council are committed to maintaining golf in Bowie. I think that goes without any question.

Over the last forty years since we’ve had a Bowie golf course, there’s been rumors that pop up, sometimes once every couple of years, sometimes once every couple of days, it feels, where there is a new plan to sell the property to a developer and build a bunch of homes. I can assure you, seven zero, that’s never been a controversial issue for this council or any previous ones.  We bought the property specifically to maintain it, to protect it, to use it as a public amenity, and we are all committed to continuing to do that.

This is not, unfortunately, a particularly new issue.  It’s just the next stumbling block in a series that we’ve had with all of our recreational amenities in Bowie.  We are one of the more amenitized communities in the region.  We’re very proud of that.

None of our facilities serve only Bowie residents. None of our facilities make a ton of money back. Most of our facilities lose money, and that’s largely by choice. We want them to be public.  We want them to be affordable. We want them to be accessible. 

The challenge that we have is reaching the point where all of our amenities are really beginning to age.  Our golf course is a half century old, and the pictures that we get on what it looks like are increasingly bleak - when we see the wooden interior and the roof and the equipment that needs replacing.  Our basketball courts, we’ve invested a lot money improving things there.  That’s one of our newer facilities.  Our golf course is, especially for many of our regular players, you know, I think someone referred to it as a dog track earlier, but our dog track.  I think that’s how a lot of us feel as well.  It’s not in the best shape.  It definitely needs some TLC., and we’re committed to make that happen.

On the last council, (we) visited the golf course, over a series of many meetings with a consulting firm, at the time, to look at all of the specific things that need improvements.  We got on the phone with our state lawmakers about possible sources of funds to improve the historic property on the site. To start repairing the irrigation.  And the city began on a long series of scheduling capital projects to improve the course, and we’re going to stick to those.  We’re committed to making that happen.  It will hopefully not be a dog track for very long. It won’t be able to all be done overnight.  It’s a lot of money, but we can, over the course of several years, continue to make some improvements to it so that it can be a really great amenity.  And with the closure of so many of the other golf courses in the area, as many of you wrote to us about, we totally recognize the importance of maintaining this particular amenity, and we also get that it can be very successful.  I don’t think we’ll have any shortage of players any time soon for quite a while.

So we’re all committed to keep it going.

Our only challenge is simply one of management.

The Bowie golf course is the only facility we have that is not directly run by city personnel. The gym is run by city employees.  The ice rink is run by city employees. The senior center is run by city employees.  The golf course is not.

For forty years, we’ve had a private company, Bowie Golf Management, running the facility for us.

For most of that time, I think the relationship was very fruitful for both sides. 

As the owners of the previous company approached retirement, I think the relationship changed a little bit - just from my perspective – just my observation.

We discovered over time that much of our relationship with the previous company was largely built on trust, and we specifically discovered that when we would go to our contract whenever there was an issue, and realize that a lot of this isn’t enforceable.  So we quickly learned that trust was really important in that relationship.

Over the course of the last few months as we’ve gotten a closer look at the operations of the golf course, we’ve realized that there are a lot of things moving forward that we absolutely want to improve upon, and a lot of things that we want to do a little bit differently.

As a result, the whole city council has been absolutely committed to the notion that if we are going to invest a very large amount of public tax dollars into the course over the next several years, we want to make sure that there is 100% absolute financial transparency and accountability.

We want to make sure that if we’re doing all of the major capital improvement projects, that we’re able to set the pace of those projects.  We recognize that there’s a lot of costs involved in this.  We wanted to make sure in writing that the city council would have the final say over rates, and that we would be able to keep rates low.

These were all non-negotiables for us from the beginning, and I think the challenge that we had is that at times – my observation – our negotiating partner simply had a different philosophy.  I think they wanted to come in, were very proud of the fact that they had the potential to run a very independent facility – more similar to the arrangement we had with Bowie Golf Management.  And throughout the process and throughout the negotiations, it just seemed to us as though there was an irreconcilable difference in philosophies about that.  The final offer we received included illusions to some of the things that we wanted, but a lot of it was not in writing.  There were things in the final offer that we received that were, from our perspective, not as great for the city as when we actually began.  Overall, all of us felt that we were further apart in the end, in many ways, then when we started.  And with the deadline looming, we were kind of stuck.

And unfortunately, being a public body, we can’t just all seven of us hang out at the pub with our friends and our negotiating partners to sign a deal.  We have to go through, unfortunately, this public process with public meetings, and deadlines and rules that we have to follow, unfortunately.

So where we are is fairly straightforward.  We are committed to maintaining public golf.  We’re committed to throwing a lot of money at it in the next few years.  A lot of these things are already scheduled in our capital improvements list. It’s just a matter of figuring out who’s going to run it day to day for us.