Since 1966 Anne Arundel County has leased the Eisenhower Golf Course property from the City of Annapolis pursuant to a 50-year contract. For the first 30 years of the deal, Annapolis reportedly got $5,000 and one-fifth of the profits greater than $5,000.
Today it gets half of the profits which amounted to $125k. In the salad days of 2006 that number was almost double.
The falling profits and some doubt on the role of government in enterprises like maintaining a golf course, regardless of their apparent profitability, is forcing officials to consider selling the course. Despite the lease contract that has not ended, it is believed that if the conditions of the existing contract are met the city has the ability to divest itself of the property.
The golf course is zoned for open-space uses – so there is little concern someone would purchase the property in order to build houses, for example. Rezoning the property was not included or considered as part of the city’s comprehensive plan and residents of the General’s Highway area adjacent to the court would likely have their own concerns.
The course is making money, but like many people in many places, it is just making less of it than it used to. Any profit center could be considered a hot commodity with those with the coin to go about buying golf courses.
Annapolis is reportedly making up ground in a budgetary sense. The city is apparently sitting on a $10 million surplus but is still behind where projections would have placed it if everyone collectively forgot the years 2008 and 2009 happened. With things growing and a sense of normalcy just over the horizon, losing the golf course to make up some ground sounds like logic to some officials.
The 200+ acres course has a tax assessment of approximately $9 million. The city’s first step in selling the course would to be to hire their own appraiser to get a more exact finding of the course’s worth to potential investors. That could cost in the tens of thousands of dollars, depending on the deal the city could strike.
As with almost any belt-tightening measure – the luxuries are the first to go. The encumbrance of open-space utilization might be a dealbreaker for some investors but a profitable and functional asset such as a golf course might make the right kind of sense for an enterprising group out there. The guaranteed lease for a few years could also be seen as a sticking point but it could also give the new owners time to put their own theories into practice. There is always more room for things to do in Annapolis and it would be a shame to lose completely an asset the city has held for half of a century.
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