Two years ago, the Boca Raton, Florida, City Council had a terrific idea. It announced plans to sell its money-losing Boca Municipal Golf Course to developer GL Homes for $65 million. Florida has more golf courses than any other state, and golf participation nationally has declined steadily over the past two decades. The sale allowed the city to exit a bad business with a windfall that could fund other city services or — just a crazy thought — be used to lower taxes and fees.
Instead, city officials chose Option C: The Greater Boca Raton Beach and Park District bought defunct Ocean Breeze Golf & Country Club for $24 million, well above the assessed value. The park district’s plan is to build a new “world-class” municipal course on the site. The price tag: another $28 million.
Even the City Council members choked when they heard that number.
None of this is unique to Boca Raton. Municipal courses, or “munis,” are an anachronism that enjoyed their heyday in the mid-20th century. In 1958, about 70% of golf courses were private clubs and 15% were munis, according to Stuart Lindsay, principal at Edgehill Golf Advisers, a consultant to course operators. Munis were a popular low-cost option for golfers who couldn’t afford memberships at private clubs. They typically were booked solid, thanks in part to Arnold Palmer’s popularity and his rivalry with Jack Nicklaus.
“Tiger Woods didn’t hold a candle to what Arnold Palmer did to boost golf,” Lindsay said, noting that the number of U.S. golfers rose from 5 million in 1960 to nearly 30 million in 2000.
By 2018, however, participation had shrunk to around 21 million golfers, and roughly 2,500 U.S. courses have closed since 2006, according to Lindsay. Munis still account for about 15% of all U.S. courses, but only about 25% of golf clubs are private.
The golf course building boom of the 1990s and early 2000s presented golfers with an abundance of privately owned public and resort courses. Many of the newer public courses delivered pricey “country-club-for-a-day” experiences. City officials around the country, seduced by the prospect of higher green fees, tried to emulate that model, often with disastrous results.
Exhibit A: Chambers Bay Golf Course in University Place, Washington, a $25 million course that opened in 2007 and hosted the U.S. Open in 2015, has lost an average of $1 million per year, according to an April report.
That’s not unusual. In Florida alone, according to a 2018 USA Today Network-Florida report, municipal courses lost nearly $100 million over the previous five years. “The municipalities forgot what their mission statement was,” Lindsay said. “They were no longer the low-cost options.”
Boca Raton officials appear headed down this path with their plans for the new, grandiosely named “Boca National Golf Course.” Before the City Council called a timeout in late August, the project’s latest price tag was pushing $52 million.
The $24 million acquisition of Ocean Breeze was tainted in ways familiar to those who follow public sector projects. Various reports said the defunct course had been assessed at a fraction of the sale price; two GL Homes’ appraisers valued the property at between $3.2 million and $5 million. After public criticism of the sale price, the district issued a new valuation of $22.7 million. The park district’s largesse was facilitated by Arthur Koski, the agency’s executive director and attorney, who tacked on a $120,000 commission as a percentage of the sale. The district’s overpayment juiced Koski’s commission.
Koski’s claim that Boca National will be “world-class” was dismissed by Kevin Atkinson, a golf course architect, who noted that the Ocean Breeze site is bounded by Interstate 95 and a railroad, bisected by a road, and surrounded by homes and condos. “Typically speaking, that doesn’t exist on what I would consider a world-class venue,” Atkinson said.
In a rare moment of fiscal sanity, Boca Raton’s City Council summoned Atkinson and other architects to an Aug. 27 meeting to see if Boca National could be built for significantly less than $28 million. The consensus was that it could be built for half.
Left unasked were two more fundamental questions: Why is Boca Raton spending millions in tax dollars to compete against local course operators? And why doesn’t the city take the $65 million and run, rather than building another money-losing golf course?
“If you really want to do the taxpayers a favor, you’ll let somebody else pay for the entire golf course and not have any taxpayer money go toward it,” one local resident told the council.
Martin Kaufmann has covered sports for more than two decades, including the past 16 years as senior editor at Golfweek.
