Deseret News | Green space, black holes: Subsidized golf courses costing cities, taxpayers

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Green space, black holes: Subsidized golf courses costing cities, taxpayers

By Jesse Hyde

Deseret News

Published: Tuesday, Aug. 23, 2005 10:40 a.m. MDT

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Spanish Fork subsidizes its course with cash from its electrical fund, which means the city could either lower its electricity rates or spend the money elsewhere instead of charging Spanish Fork residents to keep Spanish Oaks Golf Course green, whether they use it or not.

And when a city or county buys a private course, it not only saddles itself with staggering operations and maintenance costs, it also loses a huge chunk of tax revenue.

The decision to buy failing courses from private developers — as West Valley City, Salt Lake County and Sandy have done — is essentially a decision to take money away from schools.

Had the Cedar Hills course remained private it would be generating close to $100,000 a year in property tax — money that would go to the cash-strapped Alpine School District, which ranks dead last in the country for per-pupil expenditures.

"What you have are people who are not golf professionals going into business with money that's not theirs," says Fotheringham, who was elected to the Cedar Hills City Council after the course was bought. "Governments are inefficient at running a business, and they are perpetually ignorant when it comes to golf."

"The losers in all of this are people who don't play golf," says Mike Jerman, vice president of the Utah Taxpayers Association. "The government has no business running a golf course."

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Just look at Cedar Hills, Jerman says, a little town hell-bent on building a golf course, even if it meant sacrificing a library, or a swimming pool, or money for its schools along the way.

In summer 2000, Cedar Hills city officials began meeting with a developer who planned to build a golf course community at the mouth of American Fork Canyon.

He had an unusual proposal. He would build the homes. The city would build the course.

"This would bring an economic enhancement to Cedar Hills and a revenue stream," the Cedar Hills City Council was told by one of several experts who would advise them to build this course. This expert, and the others who followed, would prove to have a vested interest in the course.

Some scratched their heads at the proposal. Maybe it wasn't such a good idea. Other courses in the state were reportedly losing money. And wasn't the developer going to build the course either way?

It wasn't the first time a golf course had been pawned off on a local government. In the early 1990s, a developer built a course in Draper to satisfy an open-space requirement. In exchange, he was allowed to build at a higher density.