PANAMA CITY — Bay Dunes golfers plan to show up in force at Tuesday’s County Commission meeting to convince commissioners not to throw in the towel on efforts to keep the course open.
“I’m going to rally the troops,” said Carolyn Rossmann, an avid golfer of the course. “We’ll have a contingency. It may be bigger than the last time.”
The county received no proposals from a recent request for companies to make offers to operate the course.
Interim County Manager Dan Shaw said he’ll raise the issue at Tuesday’s meeting, and in the wake of no proposals being made, he plans to ask commissioners whether they want to continue to employ Holiday Golf Course to operate the course for the next few months.
“The immediate decision is whether they want to continue to run the course two more months now that they’ve proven they can’t get anyone to operate it,” Shaw said.
Shaw said experts have said it would cost $700,000 to redo the greens, bunkers, irrigation system and cart paths, and it’s money the county doesn’t have.
“It’s a pretty consistent number for everyone who has looked at it,” he said. “It needs a lot of work.”
Bay County was planning to shut down the course in early December, but commissioners instead decided to hire Holiday Golf Course to operate the course with a county subsidy of $25,000 a month so county officials can gauge the course’s finances and have time to advertise for a private golf management company to take over the course.
The course at 5304 Majette Tower Road opened in the early 1990s after being built on top of a county landfill.
Tony Ray had been leasing out the course property since 2011. County officials recently served him an eviction notice after he could not produce a bond the county required, but Ray said he could not acquire the bond the county was demanding.
Rossmann said she hasn’t given up hope on the course remaining open.
“I have a few questions to ask” commissioners, she said.
For starters, Rossmann said, she has concerns with the way the request for proposal document was written by Bay County. It stated that no county funds would be used on the course.
She said the request outlined many requirements for the course operators.
“It is a costly process to put a proposal together for a company,” she said. “I’m not sure they allowed enough time for companies to provide all the information they were requesting.”
Rossmann said she also wished county officials would go back to the companies that had expressed an interest in putting in a proposal and find out why they didn’t submit one.
Rossmann said the county subsidizes recreational facilities such as ball fields and should consider doing the same for a reasonably priced golf course that is used by many seniors.
“Why not allow (a subsidy) for the golf course rather than for future expansion” of H.G. Harders Park on the property? she said.
County officials have said an expansion of Harders Park might be one option to consider if the golf course closes.
The golf course “is important for exercise,” she said. “It’s important for the morale of the community. We get together, have fun, develop friends, invite more people in. It’s just a good outlet for the community.”
Bill Ronk, a member of the Bay County Parks and Recreation Advisory Board and an avid golfer of Bay Dunes, said he’d like the county to form a special committee with golf course maintenance and operations experts to come up with a recommendation about the course’s future.
Ronk doesn’t think it would take $700,000 to bring the course up to speed.
“I think the committee can look at a lot of the different options,” he said. “It’s very complicated. There are so many different ways you could subsidize it.”
He said a manager could be hired to run the course or the county could run the course.
“The big advantage of the county running it is they don’t have to make money; they can break even. Anyone who leases it has to make money or they won’t lease it,” Ronk said.
The commission meeting is scheduled to begin at 9 a.m. in the Bay County Government Center at 840 W. 11th St.