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Articles
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| City officials push to bring golf courses closer to D.C. control |
VOICE writes, "City officials push to bring golf courses closer to D.C. control
By SELBY MCCASH
D.C. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton introduced legislation last week calling for stronger local control over the federally owned public golf courses in the District -- two bordering Capitol Hill and a third in Rock Creek Park -- in order to "rescue" them from what she describes as a long history of neglect.
"These are historic places that are unworthy of the nation's capital in their present condition," Holmes said in an interview this week. "Federal government responsibility has never worked for these courses for nearly a century, and almost certainly it will not happen in the future." "
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The three golf courses are Langston Golf Course, which opened in 1939, partly on a reclaimed landfill in Northeast adjacent to RFK Memorial Stadium, to accommodate black golfers at a time when other area courses were segregated; the East Potomac Park Course, opened in 1920 on recovered marshland along the District's southern edge; and the Rock Creek Park Course, opened in 1926 in Northwest in the midst of one of the country's largest inner-city green spaces. The federal government built all three, and the National Park Service contracted the management of them to private companies.
"If the National Park Service is interested in providing quality golf for the citizens of the District, why hasn't the agency done more to bring the courses up to the 'A' level?" asked Ward 5 Council member Harry "Tommy" Thomas Jr., in an interview with The Voice. Thomas represents the ward that includes the historically black Langston Golf Course, and he is a chairman of the Council's Committee on Libraries, Parks and Recreation.
Norton and Thomas are among a number of D.C. authorities challenging federal oversight rules imposed on the locally based course managers. For some time, members of the D.C. Council and D.C. Sports and Entertainment Commission have discussed ideas for making golf course oversight more local.
Earlier proposals included enlisting congressional help to place the D.C. golf franchises in the hands of the commission or the D.C. Department of Parks and Recreation, or simply transferring outright ownership of the courses, totaling 524 acres, to the D.C. government. Instead, D.C. officials appear to be rallying around Norton's approach in the "Golf Preservation and Modernization Act." After researching the issue for weeks, Holmes said she settled on legislation that has a realistic chance of getting through Congress and signed into law by President George W. Bush.
Norton’s bill urges the Park Service to replace the existing concession-type golf contracts with a longer-term ground lease in a move to end day-by-day federal supervision and make the managing contractors virtually independent of federal limitations that do not allow them to hire private investors -- existing restrictions disallow partnering with private investors to increase funding for improvements. Federal ground-lease precedents in D.C. include RFK Stadium and the East Potomac Park swimming pool, which gives the city a lot of control over the sites.
"A long-term ground lease is the only way to attract private investment for modernization and maintenance of the courses" in order to preserve "these unique, valuable and historical D.C. attractions for future generations," Norton said in an interview this week.
Sufficient improvement of the courses and clubhouses could potentially generate a big enough increase in earnings to establish and sustain state-of-the-art golf facilities while providing surplus revenue for other community needs, Thomas said.
Although the bill would allow the Park Service to scrap the current contracts and replace them with long-term ground leases, it would not force the National Park Service to act, Norton said. But she expects the agency to have the "good sense" to accept what she sees as a "win-win" solution for the federal government and the District. It is a win-win, she said, because it would provide D.C. residents with upgraded recreational, tourist and social-service resources that would reflect favorably on the federal government.
Noting that the Park Service has not stated its position, Norton said she plans to reach out to the agency to get its cooperation and could also seek support from the White House.
The bill would also require that all three D.C. golf sites remain under one management umbrella to enable the more profitable operations to subsidize courses encountering financial difficulties. That provision conflicts with a Park Service decision to let a new seven-year concession-type management contract expire by the end of January for the Langston and Rock Creek Park courses. The contracts expired a year ago for Langston and 10 years ago for Rock Creek Park, and the Park Service has administratively extended the old contract held by the incumbent management team. The contract for the third operation at East Potomac Park will expire at the end of the year.
The Park Service recently triggered a 90-day competitive bidding process for the new contract, a development that alarmed Jimmy Garvin, president of Langston Legacy Inc. and Golf Course Specialists Inc., the interrelated private firms now managing the three golf facilities.
"It's a shame what the Park Service is doing," he said. He asked agency officials to postpone the contract process until all three facilities could be bundled together in one contract, he said. But, he added, "they were hell-bent to move ahead."
Over the past couple decades, his firms have used more than $4 million from earnings at the East Potomac Park Course to upgrade Langston, a course in a low-income area that has historically operated in the red, Garvin said. The last time Langston was managed under a stand-alone contract in the late 1970s and early ‘80s, the course fell into disrepair and came close to shutting down permanently, he said. He added that history could repeat itself if revenue-sharing between the three facilities is discontinued.
Potentially installing a separate management entity over the two financially weakest facilities is not the right way to go, Norton agreed.
Holmes acknowledged it is difficult to foresee how the situation will play out. With contract-altering legislation pending, potential bidders could be deterred from entering the competition, creating a possible rationale for postponing the process. If the bill passes before a new contract goes into effect, the Park Service would face legislation that could be interpreted as directing the agency to cancel the process. If the bill does not pass in time, the new contract apparently could pre-empt the effort to create stronger home rule over the courses.
A Park Service spokesperson said it would be inappropriate for a federal agency to comment on objections to a contract process already under way. In the past, the agency has said it planned to move forward on the expired contracts as soon as guidelines for the bids are ready.
Garvin said the firms he heads would definitely submit a bid and would expect to win if the process continued to completion. He said without the long-range vision and know-how his team has acquired over the years, the incremental progress now being made would be threatened and the courses at Langston, a facility listed as a National Historic Site, and Rock Creek Park could suffer a long decline.
Norton and Thomas both commended Langston Legacy and Golf Course Specialists for making substantial improvements in playing conditions while maintaining affordable rates for more than two decades, and for using its limited income to voluntarily fund the establishment of computer learning centers for youths and adults at two of the clubhouses, hosting junior golf programs for more than 600 young people and pioneering in environmentally friendly maintenance practices. Although some greens were severely damaged at the East Potomac Park and Rock Creek Park courses this year when a groundskeeper accidentally applied herbicide instead of a fertilizer, the D.C. representatives rated the overall record of Langston Legacy and Golf Course Specialists as exceptional.
For these reasons, Thomas said, Garvin and his team should continue to be a part of any management restructuring.
"We're not trying to interfere with the Park Service," Norton said. "We just want to work together to find a way to bring these courses into the 21st century."
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Posted on Nov 09, 2007 14:48pm.
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