Contributor Opinion by Art Stigile: 10 Questions for RedGate (UPDATED)
Jul 14, 2010 8:30 - 22 Comments
>In our recap of Monday’s Mayor and Council meeting, we promised a full list of Art Stigile’s questions about RedGate Golf Course from Citizen’s Forum. Thanks to Art’s courtesy, here they are:
Image from RedGate Golf Course
[UPDATE: Art has provided backup for his assertions in this piece; they are here.]
Next week the RedGate Advisory Committee will present its recommendations for improving the financial condition of the golf course. In anticipation of the meeting, I have 10 questions that I would like to ask the Advisory Committee. I believe they are hard, but fair, questions that should be asked of the Committee, which after all, serves primarily as the golfers’s advocacy group. I won’t be able to ask all of them tonight, but I will start tonight and finish up next week. I have already emailed them to the Chairman of the Advisory Committee and to the Mayor and Council.
- When Rockville agreed to establish the golf course in 1974, golfers promised to pay all of the expenses of the golf course and not saddle taxpayers with any of the cost. In exchange, RedGate would be run like a business that focused on meeting the needs of golfers, without a lot of meddling by taxpayers. Setting RedGate up as a separate Enterprise Fund was essential to carrying out this deal. Through 1999, golfers lived up to their bargain with taxpayers. However, Redgate has run deficits in each of the past 10 years, and taxpayers have been forced to fill the gap. Are today’s golfers willing to live by the original deal struck with taxpayers, and if not, why should taxpayers feel obligated to subsidize golf?
- RedGate is expected to run a deficit of $674,000 this year, and taxpayers are once again going to have to fill the hole. If you do the math, that works out to a taxpayer subsidy of about $19 for every round of golf played at RedGate. Does the Advisory Committee agree that this is incredibly excessive? How would you define the appropriate level?
- Redgate is expected to end the current year with a negative balance of about $2.4 million. This figure is more than double the revenue that we expect to collect from golfers for the entire year. The cumulative losses are expected to grow to $5.9 million by the end of FY 2015, which by then will be more than 5 times RedGate’s annual income. My question is this. How and when do you propose to repay taxpayers for this debt?
- Rockville has operated for several years with a requirement to run a General Fund reserve equal to 15 percent of revenue. At the June 21st meeting of Mayor and Council, staff testified that incorporating RedGate into the General Fund would immediately reduce the General Fund reserve to 13.6 percent in FY 2011 and reduce it further each year, leaving it at just 2.7 percent in FY 2015. This is a recipe for financial suicide. It would result in the loss of Rockville’s Triple A rating, make it extremely expensive to issue debt, and it would make it very difficult to operate the City budget. In light of this testimony, do you agree with the staff recommendation to keep RedGate as an Enterprise Fund, separate from the General Fund? If not, how do you suggest that Rockville deal with the dangerous drop in the General Fund reserve that would be caused by folding RedGate into the General Fund?
- When RedGate was created in 1974, it provided Rockville’s middle income golfers with their first opportunity to play quality golf at an affordable price in the local region. Today, there are numerous public golf courses within easy driving distance, including several that are owned by the County. In light of RedGate’s declining customer base and large and growing deficits, wouldn’t Rockville taxpayers be justified, indeed, be smart, to say “let’s end this wasteful duplication of services, close RedGate, and direct golfers to any of the other public course in the area?”
- The biggest flaw in the 2006 business plan was the assumption that fees would rise by about 5 percent per year. If fees had, in fact, risen by those amounts, RedGate’s revenues would be about $400,000 higher in FY 2011, and we wouldn’t be discussing the need for a new business plan. Instead, fees have stayed flat for five years, and they are likely to remain flat, given the over-saturation of the local golf market. But if fees stay flat, then the only way to eliminate the $924,000 deficit that is projected for FY 2015 is to double the number of rounds of golf played to more than 70,000. However, the number of rounds has not exceeded 50,000 since 2002, and the highest number in the past five years was 41,116 in FY 2008. Doesn’t this mean that under any realistic scenario, the only way that Rockville can continue to operate the golf course is through large and growing taxpayer subsidies?
- Last year, you vigorously opposed consideration of an option to turn RedGate over to the Revenue Authority without a long list of preconditions. Now, several large golf course operators have expressed interest in operating RedGate. Given the sharp deterioration of RedGates finances, are you now willing to support turning RedGate over to some other management company without strings, or do you continue to insist on preconditions, even if it means that taxpayers would have to continue to pay large subsidies for golfers?
- The 2006 business plan specified various measures of success, including that RedGate’s budget would return to surplus by 2009. However, it was totally silent about what would happen if these measures were not met and losses continued to rise. When I began in 2008 to point out that RedGate was off-track and the business plan would not succeed, the Chairman of the Advisory Committee advised me that I just needed to give it time to work. Now the flaws are abundantly clear, and we are considering yet another rescue plan for RedGate that, by necessity, would depend on large taxpayer subsidies for several years. My question is this. In exchange for continuation of taxpayer subsidies for a defined period of time, would the Advisory Committee agree to a business plan with hard targets that, if not met, would require closing the golf course?
- RedGate has been operated by the same manager for many years. Despite his best efforts, deficits have risen, and they are projected to grow as far as the eye can see. Given the results, would the Advisory Committee agree to a new business plan that includes replacing the current manager?
- Finally, from FY 2011 through FY 2015, taxpayers are going to have to spend about $4.2 million to cover RedGate’s deficits. That’s a lot of money, and there are many other ways to spend that money for the benefit of taxpayers. For example, we could put another 6-7 police officers on the street with that money. We could double our support of caregiver agencies, which certainly would make sense in this recession. We could use it to pay for replacing about 2.5 miles of water lines, instead of borrowing the money, or we could pay for about a third of the cost of converting the old Post Office to a police headquarters. We could actually fund the Mayor’s dream of creating a Rockville Science Center for our kids, which I have to say as a proud father whose daughter left Einstein High School a year early because she was bored, and who just graduated at age 20 with her Masters in Engineering, the Science Center would be the best new investment in kids that Rockville could start. Or, we could just cut the property tax rate and let taxpayers keep the money. My list could go on for an hour. My question is this. Could you tell us why golf should have priority over so many other public services that obviously would provide greater public benefits, and why the golf subsidy shouldn’t be the first thing on the chopping block in the FY 2012 budget?
Art Stigile
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Great list of questions and (I’m assuming the facts laid out are correct) certainly deserve a straight answer. As a Rockville resident and taxpayer, I will be following this issue and paying attention to who’s on what side of an issue. I have played Redgate and liked it but I do not feel that given the business proposition the course is something Rockville should be in the “business of”. If it were a private business it would have been sold a long time ago.
Tom, The data for all of the factual statements in my questions come from the staff report and attachments for the June 21, 2010 meeting of M&C, and from the FY 2011 Budget document. Both are published on the City website. If it would be useful, and if Brad doesn’t mind the clutter, I would be happy to provide the precise citation for each piece of data and my calculations using those data. I didn’t do that for the questions because it would easily run to a few additional pages that would make for great reading at bedtime, but probably would be read by only a few budget geeks like me.
Art, if you want to provide that backup as a Word document Rockville Central can host it so people can examine it if they choose.
It’s hard to make the case for subsidizing golf with so many other golf venues available locally. Perhaps a small subsidy would be reasonable, but the ‘per round’ subsidy is $19, and the total yearly subsidy is over $600,000. I suspect the economics of operating a golf course will get worse over time rather than better.So if we aren’t going to have golf there, what should we do with it? I think that maintaining it as open space makes sense. But noting the many ways that our agricultural systems are unsustainable (erosion that degrades soil faster than it forms, irrigation that relies on ground water depletion, fossil based fertilizers, heavy dependence on oil for plowing, planting and harvesting) I would prefer an alternative that increases local food production. I see two main alternatives – • Return the course to nature, planting it with nut trees, blackberries and such and reserving a few acres for community gardens. This should cost about the same as the “back to nature” option, which was estimated by the City to cost about $1,050,000 for the conversion and $112,000 a year for maintenance. So the conversion would be an initial excess expenditure of around $400,000, and then a yearly savings of over $500,000 when compared to maintaining the status quo. • Convert the course to a privately operated orchard, similar to Butler’s Orchard. I would envision exploring this by issuing a Request for Information to see how much interest there is by farmers and to explore long term lease versus selling the land with appropriate restrictions on its use. I suspect that we can’t expect to make a money off this approach, but that we should be able to expect the farmer who converts the land to an orchard to bear the expense of the conversion, thus saving the Rockville taxpayer the million dollar cost of ‘back to nature’ conversion. While we may not make much money off of this approach, we can stop the $600,000 per year subsidy that we currently provide to golfing.
I vote “farm park” myself, complete with community gardens. In a previous discussion about this, though, someone did point out that golf course grass has very likely been maintained with lots of chemicals over the years that might be hard to get out for safe cultivation of produce, but I’d be interested to know if that is indeed the case and if so, whether it can be amended and how extensive (and expensive) an undertaking that would work out to.
Most modern pesticides break down over time - most uses of DDT for instance are banned. Further, pesticides are washed away with the rain. So if you stop poisoning the land, the poison goes away. Perhaps not far enough away - poisons concentrate in waterways and then in the creatures that live in the water, then further into the predatory fish and finally into the birds that eat these fish. That’s why we saw the problems first in eagles and ospreys. The return of these birds show we are doing a better job. I wouldn’t worry about returning a golf course to farming use. I’d worry more about the ongoing excessive use of pesticides that wind up in way to the Bay. Converting a typical golf course to a typical orchard would likely reduce the amount of pesticides used.
Depends on how much spraying is done on the trees. :-\Anyone know how long it would take for those toxins to degrade fully enough for safe cultivation and consumption? Does this stuff have a half-life in the soil?
I’m not an expert on pesticides, but I found a table of pesticide half lives at CHEMICAL HALF-LIFECarbaryl (Sevin®) 595,225 low high 10 days Chlorothalonil (Bravo®) 204,342 very low low 30 days Diazinon 39,308 low low 40 days Disulfoton (Di-Syston®) 360,714 low medium 30 days Malathion 314,365 low low 1 day Methamidophos (Monitor®) 11,932 high very high 6 days Methyl Parathion (Penncap-M ®) 676,037 low low 5 days PCNB (Terraclor®, Turfcide®) 393,137 very low low 21 days Phorate (Thimet®) 75,134 low low 60 days
I’m not an expert on chemical half lives, but found a table at http://insects.tamu.edu/extension/bulletins/water/water_01.html that sheds some light on the subject.CHEMICAL HALF-LIFE4Carbaryl (Sevin®) 10 daysChlorothalonil (Bravo®) 30 daysDiazinon 40 daysDisulfoton (Di-Syston®) 30 daysMalathion 1 dayMethamidophos (Monitor®) 6 daysMethyl Parathion (Penncap-M ®) 5 daysPCNB (Terraclor®, Turfcide®) 21 daysPhorate (Thimet®) 60 daysThe half life of modern pesticides is weeks or months, not years. I think the pesticide concerns do not block agricultural use of former golf courses.
Wow, if they turn it into a farm park with a community garden, I would LOVE to see a greenhouse as well….they’ll get A LOT of volunteer hours out of me! I would love to get involved in that.
Rockville could probably save a lot of money by germinating and growing a small nursery and greenhouse operation to supply all the median and park plantings….something that I’m sure costs a fair amount every year….seeds and starts are pretty cheap, and if someone who’s very good at propogating can help *raises hand* that might help save…
Following are slightly edited extracts from two emails I have written in the past few days on the issue of Redgate. I want to give Rockville Central readers an idea of the complexity of the issue and the tradeoffs we may be facing. 1. In response to a neighbor who supports keeping RedGate open I wrote:Dear Neighbor,The choice might come down to RedGate, some other City recreational facility, or a tax hike. The other large City recreational facilities we have include: Thomas Farm Community Center, Lincoln Park Community Center, Twinbrook Community Center, the Senior Center, the Swim Center, the Glenview mansion and the Fitzgerald Theatre, the Croydon Creek Nature facility, and a few much more minor locations. These all operate at less than cost recovery, but these were explicit decisions made by past elected officials, and are accounted for in the budget. Redgate is supposed to break even but it’s not close to doing so. It required about $580,000 in FY 2010, and over $900,000 by FY2015.In Rockville overall, the past year we lost 15 positions through attrition, and revenues from the state and county have either dried up or are in danger of disappearing altogether, while our property tax base remains flat. 2. Here is what I wrote to Art Stigile when he sent his 10 questions to the Mayor and Council email.Art,Thanks very much for your questions. They are hard questions and fair ones. They will be the questions that Mayor and Council have to deal with. I am glad that you have posed these to the Redgate Advisory Committee ahead of time so that they can prepare answers for them. They would have been asked these questions during the presentation anyway. Question: Don’t we have a very large money problem in almost any politically viable resolution of the RedGate issue? For example, we have learned that bringing RedGate as a golf course into the General Fund creates an immediate and ongoing problem with our reserves (as you note and document). But let’s say that we cease golf operations and end the Enterprise fund and operate RedGate as a passive park. Don’t we have the same immediate issue with the General Fund reserve in that case? Also to add as background to this, I asked a few months ago, what it would cost to close down RedGate. City Staff answered this a few weeks ago. It turns out that we would have some one-time costs such as removing the parking lot and building, but some ongoing costs. For at least 5 years, we would have to take care of invasive species in land that we let go back to nature. This (if I recall correctly) is about $3000 per acre per year. Then there would be some costs associated with mowing the grass in the passive park. So, when I look at this as a Councilmember who must not only deal with RedGate viability, but also with a budget that we all want to balance and to preserve the AAA rating, I need to know it both ways. Not only what are the ramifications of keeping RedGate going, but what are the ramifications of closing it. Related issue: If we choose to keep RedGate going, still in its Enterprise Fund, shouldn’t we be charging its debt already to the General Fund reserve since there does not appear to be a viable way for golf to recover this money?This is the main reason that I asked my Mayor and Council colleagues if they would support a very low density residential use of all or part of that property. Because, I’m feeling more and more that in order to extricate ourselves financially from this situation, that we’re going to have to get a cash infusion somehow in order to maintain those necessary General Fund reserve levels.To note, my suggestion to Mayor and Council to consider a low-density residential option did not succeed, failing by a 3-2 vote.
For those readers who are unfamiliar with Redgate, let me invite you to join the August 12 Science Cafeat 8PM at Redgate Golf Course. The Perseids meteor shower occurs that night and Dr. Williams from Montgomery College will bring us up to speed on the night sky even if like last year, it is cloudy. I’m certainly not a golfer and in fact had not been on the Redgate golf course ’till last year. Was I ever impressed with that wonderful open space, the green attitude of the manager including the use of a dog to herd the geese off the property and the beauty of the property. Like the Civic Center, I consider it a Rockville treasure.
Ruth, In many ways your post illustrates extremely well the conundrum the City finds itself in.Like you, a vast, vast majority of us are not golfers. Like you, a vast, vast majority of us have been on the RedGate property less than one or two or three times in the past twenty years. Like you, in spite of our lack of participation, many of us consider the RedGate property a “Rockville treasure.”But given the golf course’s sparse utilization (and the availability of many other courses for those who want to play), how many of us would really support the raising of our property taxes in order to keep operating a golf course (this, especially in a context where we may be able to preserve a vast majority of the property as open space through another use, without the need to raise taxes)?
Whatever is done - or not done
- with Redgate, I do hope it remains a large open space. I’m hoping to join the meteor-watchers at the course, and would love to have some wide-open space in the city for the long term, as opposed to more housing. I really think we have enough houses in Rockville, and totally agree with Ruth that the space is a treasure, something that many cities our size don’t have. If for whatever reason it doesn’t continue as a golf course, there is still plenty of value in the open space.In response to Mark’s letters which he excerpted for us, and in which he raises some points I hadn’t considered: If the space were returned to a “passive park,” I know of other invasive species measures which have been undertaken by volunteer efforts; I know at least the homeschool community, along with other groups, was aware of moves to help curb garlic mustard and there were countless volunteers pulling up the stuff in nature centers nearby, I think including the Lake Frank vicinity. Efforts like this could help cut costs for invasive plant removal. If the area became a park, parking might still be needed so removing the parking lot might not be necessary. If the space eventually became, say, partly community gardens (parking lot still a good idea), a nominal fee would help to at least defray the cost of maintaining some of the rest of the space. If the building could be economically repurposed as another small-scale recreation center on the scale, say, of the Pump House, it could be rented for events such as parties (especially with a kitchen!), or maybe simply replaced with picnic pavilions (which could also be rented) and some playground equipment; whether the money spent on construction and maintenance could be recovered might be worth looking into. Late-night musings off the top of my head, things I’ve been mulling over, especially since we live so close to Redgate. 
Regarding the need for the City to pay money to convert the golf course to passive use and to control invasive species for many years, I would note that these wouldn’t apply if we converted the land to an orchard. The farmer would then be responsible for the conversion to an orchard, and control of invasives would be part of the normal operations. (indeed, the farmer would be cultivating such desirable non-native species as apples, peaches, cherries and strawberries.) We should issue a request for information to test the viability of this option. If it looks promising and gets the support of three members of the Mayor and Council, this would be followed up with a Request for Proposals and a negotiation process to establish the agreement by which Redgate Golf Course would become Redgate Orchard.
The comments by Council members Gajewski and Pierzchala touch directly on what has been driving me to raise questions for the past couple of years about the escalating costs of the golf course. RedGate was never supposed to be a cost to taxpayers. Golfers were supposed to pay for the full costs. That’s what our budgets have assumed since the Golf course was created in 1974. Now taxpayers are being asked to pay for about $900,000 of RedGate’s budget on a permanent basis. This hasn’t been included in past budgets, and there’s no slack in the budget that can be redirected to RedGate. Instead, it’s a huge, new cost that either has to be absorbed by cutting other programs or by raising taxes. I have no interest in cutting higher priority programs or raising taxes to provide a $19 subsidy every time a few folks want to play golf. If you want to play golf and you are willing to pay for it, go ahead and enjoy one of the many other public golf courses in the area. But our tax dollars should be used to maintain essential services. We don’t have enough money to do both.Just last night, before the start of Citizen’s Forum, the Director of Public Works spoke about the need to approve emergency procurements in excess of $100,000 to determine what is causing breaks in a section of water main that connects Rockville’s Water Treatment Plant to Rockville’s water customers. The plant has been out of service since July 12 due to the two recent water main breaks, and we are getting by with water from WSSC. If we want to maintain the high quality of life in Rockville, our budgets need to focus on maintaining these kinds of critical services.And if we have any money left after funding core services, I would much rather spend it on services that provide much higher benefits. One idea that has intrigued me, ever since I heard the Mayor first mention it, is the idea of a Rockville Science Center for kids. We are so quick to fund recreation. Why not fund an activity that will challenge the minds of our kids and point them in a direction that will greatly benefit the futures and our Nation’s future prosperity? Every time our Mayor and Council vote to throw more taxpayers’ dollars at RedGate, they are at the same time deciding, without saying so, that they won’t fund a worthwhile idea like this. We simply cannot afford both.Essential services, a Rockville Science Center, or more subsidies for RedGate golf? These are simple choices for me.
Not sure that I see recreation as being a bad funding choice; there are lots of options offered in a variety of areas. (Full disclosure: I teach a class thru the Rec Department.
) It’s a quality of life issue for our family, having those classes available to our family at an affordable cost so we, especially our kids, can try things our family otherwise wouldn’t begin to be able to afford, in locations that are convenient for us (as opposed to some of the further-out options available thru Montgomery County’s Rec Dept).Out of curiosity, has there ever been a more formal survey or study done with residents to gauge the interest in a science center beyond the mayor’s long-time interest in one? Might this be something that could be done in conjunction with, say, the nature centers? How large an undertaking would we be looking at? Not sure we can justify the cost of building and maintaining anything along the scope of say the Maryland Science Center in Baltimore, especially given that so many people go to Baltimore or to museums in DC, and DC’s attractions are by and large far more Metro-accessible than the Redgate site. Might be time to start a separate thread or article for comment here on a science center?I do agree, though, that essential services do need to take priority. Safe running water isn’t something I’d like to be without.
The City had a Science Center Feasibility Study in 2006 and it concluded “A science center in Rockville is feasible based on the content, presentation,attendance, economic, and facility circumstances and assumptions made in thisreport..”http://www.rockvillemd.gov/cip/science-ctr-feasibility-study.
Just caught up with all the great comments….I sure hope that our officials are not advocating any development on the Redgate property. I think that location, completely car-dependent, is NOT where development should happen in Rockville. Especially when it’s adjacent to Rock Creek Park, and the transit and existing infrastructure are not.
I agree with Deb’s comment that a rich recreation program adds to the quality of life. But we can offer recreation programs without also subsidizing them.
Tax dollars should be used to subsidize programs when the subsidy achieves some additional public purpose beyond offering recreation. Personally, I’m willing to subsidize low-income individuals and kids who otherwise would not be able to enjoy the recreational services. I’m willing to subsidize kids just to give them something to do, so they aren’t roaming the streets. RedGate is an expensive subsidy and goes mostly to adults who can afford to pay for their recreation. Golfers would continue to have numerous other opportunities to play golf nearby, if RedGate were closed.
Also, and this is hugely important, RedGate’s subsidy is not built into our taxpayer-funded spending base. There’s no separate line item for RedGate subsidies. If we are going to start providing large subsidies for golf, we will have to make room for them in the budget. We have two options. We could cut other spending, which would probably come out of other Recreation and Parks programs, because they are the most discretionary programs in the budget. We couldn’t get services like police, roads, and other core programs to fund golf (I hope). I suspect that the public’s strong support for our current recreation programs would prevent the Mayor and Council from cutting them by enough to fund RedGate.
Which leaves the following simple equation: RedGate = tax increase.
it’s a HUGE stretch to say that redgate is part of the recreational offerings of the city. as shown over and over, it is used by a tiny fraction of rockville residents and has an even tinier, yet influential, fan base. let’s hope reason wins out over campaign loyalties in the final discussion.