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David’s sling stings Detroit
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A small residential community nestled in the midst of metropolitan Detroit is fighting the good fight to save its historic golf course.
Huntington Woods (pop. 6,000), backed by community leaders and a resolute campaign supporting its 1923 Donald Ross layout, Rackham Golf Course, recently challenged efforts by the economically strapped city of Detroit to sell the golf course by offering $6 million for the popular venue that hosts more than 68,000 rounds a year.
The complicated affair begins with the fact that the course is owned by Detroit — a gift from Horace Rackham in 1924 — leased by American Golf Corp. and situated within a community barely a mile square. In fact, the 123-acre layout comprises 17 percent of Huntington Woods.
Rackham GC’s dilemma began more than a year ago, when the Detroit city administration began selling “surplus property” and found a developer, Premium Golf, that was willing to buy the golf course for $11.25 million and build 400 homes on the land. That prompted an uprising of sorts in Huntington Woods, which made an offer of its own and also pointed to 80-year-old deed restrictions that state the property must remain a public golf course.
Last December, Premium Golf suddenly withdrew from the fray. In the ensuing months, Huntington Woods and Detroit officials have bandied purchase figures while legal issues related to the deed restrictions have continued to simmer — upheld in one court and appealed in another.
The fervor to save Rackham was further noted on Feb. 27, when a proposal for a special millage hike to pay the community’s legal costs on the matter passed resoundingly, 1,684 to 182. On June 19, the Huntington Woods City Commission voted 3-1 to accept Detroit’s latest price of $6 million for the course. As of late August, the Detroit City Council had not made a decision on the matter.
“They’re still kicking around a number of things, is what we hear,” Rackham’s superintendent, Adam Hosler, says of the David-and-Goliath confrontation.
Hosler, a 10-year member of GCSAA, has been with American Golf for 18 years, the last half-dozen of those years at Rackham. The Ohio native says he worked his way up to the point of taking over at the classic Ross design, complete with domed greens, and he’d hate to lose that opportunity now.
“The unfortunate thing is, it takes something like this to get the community involved in the golf course,” Hosler says. “Before, it was like we were the ones making noise and disturbing everyone early in the morning. Now, it’s, ‘We love the golf course; we’ve got to save it.’ Well, I hope they do.”
According to the 2006 survey Profiling the Golf Course Superintendent, the average annual maintenance budget of superintendents, including payroll and water expenditures, is $806,000. When it comes to testing out new products on the course, 50 percent of superintendents wait for others to try first; 28 percent stick with a past product or brand that’s been successful; and 22 percent are usually among the first to try. Success of a new product was most frequently (74 percent) attributed to word of mouth from other superintendents. The Outdoor Power Equipment Institute has expressed concern about how new ethanol blends will affect lawn mowers, chainsaws and other similar machinery. OPEI officially supports legislation that mandates a government study of the use of ethanol blends, citing remaining questions about the effect of ethanol fuels on engine wear, maintenance and long-term emissions. The pertinent legislation was introduced by Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) as a portion of the Senate’s Energy and Natural Resources Committee’s Energy Bill (S 987). Visit www.opei.org for more information. |
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