First County-Owned Golf Course Sparks Battle on the Green
Plan Too Upscale, Fees Too High?
By Anna Borgman
Washington Post Staff Writer
September 7, 1995
It certainly wasn't obvious that a rebellion had been brewing for some time when Howard County public officials, business leaders, developers and avid golfers gathered last week for a few dusty rounds of golf without grass.
The occasion: the seeding of the first county-owned public golf course in what some describe as a woefully underserved golf market.
Only committed golfers could know the joy of playing on a course before the seeding, before the grass, where dust lies like talcum powder over acres of recently cleared land. They called it the seedless invitational.
But beneath the surface of the otherwise serene occasion raged class warfare, suburban style. Leading the quiet objectors was Robert Rutan, a retired Army colonel who drives a white Mercedes-Benz, plays 54 holes a week and feels Howard County's new course will be too upscale, too country clubbish, just plain too expensive.
Rutan, the head of an 80-member seniors golfing club who sits on a Howard golf advisory board appointed by County Executive Charles I. Ecker (R), has been losing the battle, but he still holds out hope. As far as he is concerned, golfers fall into two categories: those who love the game and those, he said with slight disgust, who play for the "social aspect."
County officials said they hope the new public course, the Timbers at Troy in eastern Howard, will snare a ranking on Golf Digest magazine's coveted list of the top 10 new public courses. They say a first-class course could serve as an economic development tool for the county, attracting high-class business executives who appreciate a good golf game.
"It's been shown that probably as much business is done on the golf course as in the boardroom," said Jeffrey A. Bourne, director of the Howard Recreation and Parks Department. "This course will be a place the county can use to market itself."
The typical golfer probably will pay daily fees of $20 to $25, which Bourne said falls in the "middle range" of greens fees. "There wasn't anyone else stepping forward to fill that niche," Bourne said. "Government often functions best when it fills a void the private sector either can't or won't fill."
But Rutan has quite different ideas. The course should be affordable for firefighters, police officers, schoolteachers and senior citizens, he argued. Rutan said he golfs at public courses in neighboring Baltimore County and the city of Baltimore for $7.50 to $12 a round.
Howard County should skip the fancy clubhouse it already has designed and focus instead on a small pro shop, a snack stand and a park area with picnic tables for family celebrations and bull roasts, Rutan said. He worries that the county is becoming a victim of its own affluence, succumbing to an unreasonable standard of what is necessary and what is luxury.
"Bob is well-known as perhaps a voice in the wilderness on golf course rate structure," said Donald Dunn, chairman of the 1,500-member Howard County Golfers Association. "He would just as soon have free golf. This gets down to the issue of whether you believe in subsidies or market forces."
County officials said they rejected Rutan's proposals because they are not economically sound, and they point out that the public courses in Baltimore are older ones that have paid off their debt service. The difference in cost between a basic and deluxe golf course is relatively minimal, Bourne said. And a lesser course would be less likely to pay for itself, he said. The county has borrowed $10.7 million through revenue bonds to pay for the $7.5 million course, planning to use greens fees to pay off the debt.
For now, Howard's first county-owned course is 200 acres of bulldozered brown, but it soon will be full of grass, bunkers and water hazards. Todd Arterburn, the course developer, said 14 holes could open as early as July, followed shortly by four additional holes.
That Howard County needs more golf courses seems undisputed, even with Friday's opening of Fairway Hills, a private course open to members of the Columbia Association, the homeowners organization that provides recreational facilities for residents of Columbia.
A park-and-ride lot at the intersection of Interstate 70 and Route 32 often has 100 cars of golfers who are headed to southern Pennsylvania or western Maryland for a day of recreation, Rutan said. Statistical analysis of the population per public golf hole shows that there is only one hole for every 4,400 people in the Timbers at Troy's area, compared with a national average of one hole for every 1,931 people, according to a county consultant's 1994 report.
Dunn said the county is certainly not hostile to the less fortunate. He said he hopes a $25,000 developer contribution will be used to pay for a special caddying program for "disadvantaged youth."
And what is disadvantaged? "We're not going to measure it by race or income or anything like that," Dunn said. "It's going to be anyone who is disadvantaged with respect to golf."
Definition: a young person who does not come from a golfing family.
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