He complained that the city only had one park and that he had to go to American Fork to go swimming and Pleasant Grove to go to a library.

"Is it your impression that the golf course is where this money is going?" Sears asked. He asserted the course had nothing to do with the tax hike.

"It's my fear that someday we'll be subsidizing it," Creer said.

"Five years from now," Sears responded, "this is just my personal opinion, this will mature with time; you won't find too many people who don't think that the golf course is an asset to the city."

When the course opened a year later, a beaming Sears told a reporter how much fun it was to play and promised its success but backpedaled from his previous bullish projections.

Now it would take five to seven years for the course to make money.

"If this succeeds, I won't get any credit," he said. "If it fails, I'll get all the blame."

Nine months later, no one was thanking Sears for his vision. The City Council was talking about selling the course and Sears was thinking about quitting.

"We had been asking for weeks and weeks for numbers on the golf course, to see if it was making money, and the mayor wouldn't give them to us," Cromar recalls. "The day they came in was the day he quit."

Not only was the course losing money, there was no way the small town could make its first payment. The next year the payment would go up by $100,000, and continue to increase by that much until 2007, when a lump sum of $6 million was due. If Cedar Hills defaulted on its loan, it would become the first city in the nation since the Great Depression to do so.

A day after Sears quit, he was golfing at Gladstan, a municipal course in Payson that was also losing money.

While Sears golfed, the new mayor scrambled to clean up the mess created by the previous administration. In November 2004, the city told its residents they may be billed $11 a month to help pay for the golf course.

"People were furious," Cromar says. "It was like, 'That damn golf course, why did we believe in these people?' "

One called for a lawsuit against Sears. Cromar demanded the Utah County Attorney's Office conduct a formal probe into the matter. And some suggested the city just declare bankruptcy.

People in Utah who love golf — there are 260,000 by one estimate — will tell you it would be a mistake for municipalities to stop building courses just because of what has happened at Cedar Hills.

"A few courses have given publicly funded golf courses a bad name, and each of those courses had individual problems," says Joe Watts, president of the Utah Golf Association.