creation director and i am joined here today bar by mark sewell who is our parks and recreation business analyst so we'll be following up on the report that staff made to you on the golf course at your october th meeting returning with additional information that the committee requested and also in your packet was a copy of the consultants report that we talked about at our last meeting so just quickly in today's presentation we're going to overview not spend a lot of time on information that we already shared with you but we have added some additional projections for the next ten years depending on the level of play we'll review the options we are bringing you additional information on general fund and general fund support in parks and recreation programs that you asked for we also staff have been pulling together some additional information on trends and municipal golf especially locally so we thought that would be of interest and over viewing the five operating models that are the focus of the consultants report and then talking about where do we go from here so again this is just beginning the discussion we have were identifying a pending financial challenge at the golf course given trends that we've seen and so we are starting the discussion about options that city council can consider going forward a final decision on whether or not to make a change at the golf course is needed by june two thousand and fifteen so nationally as well as regionally  we are seeing declining interest in the sport of golf this has been going on for a number of years fewer people are playing and those who are are playing less frequent li we have seen an over expansion of golf courses across the country that has come into play so that play is now distributed over more courses that certainly has happened here locally to us as well and the golf industry was very affected by the recession so people made different choices with their money for their leisure activities for the santa barbara golf club our local golf market has become far more competitive courses that were more mid to higher end now because they're experiencing all the same challenges as us they are reducing their price points so they are now more competitive with us and and that's really it affects us because we have to be careful about our price  increases and it can price us out of the market pretty quickly so increasing our pricing to solve our problem is not really a good solution and just we showed this to you the rounds back in the s and and just at the start of the s and then play has consistently been declining since then we have been relatively stable for the last four or five years so that's a good thing but we are you know much much less play than we saw over the years i thought it would be helpful to just revisit both the revenue and the expense associated with the golf course so not necessarily numbers we're about a two million dollar a year operation but seventy nine percent of the revenue at the golf course comes from fees the golf fee so again the golf fund is an enterprise fund it does not receive in a general fund or tax support so seventy nine percent of the revenue comes from fees paid by golfers the concessions the restaurant in the pro shop contribute another sixteen percent and then we have minor revenue beyond that on the expense side fifty percent of our operating costs are salary and benefits and if you combine supplies and allocated costs which are simply computer risk management insurance facility maintenance things like that that's another twenty seven percent we have about thirteen percent in debt and ten percent committed to capital speak it's it's actually the cost that we pay for the maintenance of the city structures so whether it's the phone lines the computer lines the computer equipment that is planning ahead for future capital improvements that are needed is that ten percent amount fully funded amount for two to knock off all the projects on the gulf about average we have in putting these projections together shown what should be spent at the golf course to maintain the facilities during the last few years we defer a lot of maintenance and we are now playing catch up so we believe that in this budget and in our projections that what we have projected is investing appropriate amounts back into the facility and  on this a little bit yeah the debt costs i mean you were saying that deferring can you refresh our memory on what that i mean it seems to me that was borrowing money to finish off a project and anyway maybe give us a little bit of two projects one was the renovation of the clubhouse which was done i think back in the s and so we are still paying off that debt and  then the golf course saved the improvement master plan had a number of capital projects that were associated with it the golf course had built up a capital reserve that paid for a lot of that and then there was a loan from the general fund to pay for the balance and a repayment plan that the golf course would repay the general fund and over the last three years probably was we've had more financial challenges staff have come back to city council and asked to renegotiate those terms so that it would lessen the impact on the course now and spread that impact over a longer period of time and so we've done that and and so how much debt is it then it's it's roughly about two hundred thousand dollars a year but i mean total the total what's the total amount one three million left on that debt and so then that's seven years left on the payback or something like that great thanks yeah so and i'm sorry one more time around look really a thin to understand this i think it is it's a curriculum critically important slide so in the past we were apparently not putting enough money into a capital budget hence the need to borrow to do those projects and so we're gonna pay that debt down over time and when that's done we won't have that debt again because because now we're putting the proper proper amount into the capital reserve that would prevent having to borrow in the future so there's a point said i would say that i think it keeps up with the normal major maintenance it would the clubhouse and the golf course safety improvement plans i wouldn't say those were normal maintenance those were a complete renovation of a of a building you know ground up  and and then on the golf course that was a pretty substantial number of different project elements as part of the master plan so the if there were additional projects that were identified that were more significant improvements than we could be talking about needing to plan about how we would fund some kind of a multi million dollar improvement we are not including that here i think we're really trying to not over inflate numbers but to be pretty realistic i think that this amount of money keep don't tend to see we have a number of maintenance buildings which are you know on their last legs and things like that stuff which really has to be done over time and that would be funded within our projections and our planning just the major huge like i say new building type of idea would be the thing where we'd be looking for some other financing is there a master plan that contemplates those kind of changes and is there a timeframe associated with those kinds of changes there is a master plan more for the golf course and years ago the golf course conducted a study with a golf consultant to come up with measures that could be taken to improve the safety at the golf course our golf course is constrained on a site that is much smaller than most eighteen hole courses with the driving range and associated facilities we had a lot of balls leaving the property so with that consultant they came in they mapped the course they identified a number of improvements that should if implemented reduce the number of balls leaving the course so we have still projects identified as part of that plan that need to be implemented some of those are included in this capital program some are not i guess i need to know which ones aren't and why aren't they and i think if we were going to take this conversation further and if you wanted us to come up with a much more extensive capital program we could do that i'm staff have not put that kind of time into this we do feel that this is a very good capital plan or what we have in maintaining what we have so as part of the long term projections i guess where i'm going with this is at some point those debt costs are gone and if we're properly putting money aside to avoid future debt we won't have those debt costs in the future except for these extraordinary expenses like replacing the clubhouse that would be correct and i guess you know that i would assume is a four thousand and fifty year life building kind of equation so it's kind of irrelevant for the conversation we're having today and i guess it's in that context this is reassuring we don't need to worry about that so the timing issue is that dead end that we can capture that two hundred thousand dollars a year revenue as part of this full ecological view of this situation this is one of those inflection points as you say we're looking at next june is a decision moment so to have that that sense of that all those projects that are you know they're not on this radar and yet they're there projects and they are in a master plan i would think that we would somehow to make these decisions wisely these long term decisions wisely that we would at least have those placeholder numbers to be working with miss rapp is the is the golf master plan available in digital form yes it is okay maybe you could send each of the committee members the link to that that would be great thank you just to revisit these are the golf fund reserves in two thousand and twelve thirteen and fourteen we have been below policy reserves since two thousand and eight and we do have projections that depending on what happens with play we could exhaust golf fund reserves within the next twelve to eighteen months and this slide gives you that overview of what could happen the bars red bars being policy reserves what we are projecting for income and expenses and what the policy level would be and where we would see the reserve level be based on a two percent growth over year over a year from two thousand and fourteen no change in play which i think is probably most likely or we could see  continued decline two percent so in all of those scenarios assume a one dollar fee increase per year which we haven't always done and i'm not sure is sustainable given the competitive market that we're in and this is the chart that staff put together that show you what you know with all the assumptions being which retires partially in two thousand and eighteen and partially in two thousand and twenty two and this chart does show that if play stays flat that by tw twenty three we might be back into a positive situation for the golf course but realistically looking at that detailed chart we could be looking at a need for subsidy that ranges from a hundred thousand to five hundred thousand per year which would be five to twenty five percent of the golf operating budget the difficulty is we really don't know what's going to happen with play again we've seen a national decline the the golf industry is projecting flat or at best a one percent growth all factors being considered this decline in play is affecting all golf courses whether they're private or public and so it's it's a trend that we're in so but we were hoping that this would kind of give you a better sense of you know worst case best case situation is the consultant that did the report is still working for us we are planning to have him be present at the city council presentation on december th if you had a particular question for additional information we'd be happy to see what we could do to pull that together one thing that occurred to me that it wasn't in the report is you know the golf industry projections of growth i'd love to know going back ten years what the golf industry was saying about growth and then what actually happened because i think that you know that would be that would help with the credibility of that prediction today we'd be happy to get that i can tell you pretty much i think they had a little very much a kind of sunshine perspective and i think that year over year of decline has has changed that and they've been much more conservative because i can remember you know three or four years ago them saying you know they were projecting a a two to four percent you know increase and you know we're just not seeing that kind of growth and now i just was reading some additional reports put together for the city of oxnard and another city up north and very similarly flat to one percent but we'll ask him to see if he can put that together so this leads us to basically two questions whether or not city council would want to provide some level of subsidy from the general fund either putting the golf course itself as a general fund program or leaving the golf course as an enterprise fund and providing a level of subsidy to keep the golf course operating in the black year over year and to if not would council consider an alternate operating model which the major difference between the different models would be non city maintenance because we currently do provide maintenance using city employees which increases our operating costs compared to other models is there any reason to have the if you went for option one and had a subsidy is there any reason to retain the enterprise fund and just have the general fund subsidize it it seems like an artificial accounting exercise i i think it would be it's it's probably a question to ask the finance department i think from a staff perspective i think i would say it's parks and recreation director having general fund programs and an enterprise fund which stands a little bit more alone and there's a higher level of concern for cost recovery i would say for an interim measure i probably would lean more towards providing a subsidy until we see what happens you know in a few more years with the sport of golf and i will say then as we get into this we are seeing other cities doing the same thing so they're not some are moving the golf course into the general fund but more commonly we're seeing that the general fund is providing a level of subs and i i think the golf industry is in flux and we are certainly not at the level where we're saying you know let's not have a golf course at all we are not there at all and the play at our course is very good in fact we get more play at our course than most other courses so it's just comparatively and in our financial structure we're having you know the fiscal challenges so the last time that we were here the finance committee members asked if we could provide a little bit more information on parks and recreation general fund subsidy so what you see before you is the parks and recreation general fund budget which includes administration parks and recreation the golf course and the creeks fund  both separately funded not receiving general fund support so the general fund provides a sixty three percent subsidy overall for the parks and recreation department and you can see that it varies by division with the recreation division having the lowest level of subsidy primarily because of the number of activities and park and facility rentals and all of that revenue which comes back to help offset our operating costs and as you know we do provide a higher level of subsidy for programs and services serving the general community the example that i gave is we don't charge people when they show up at a park the city pays for that the city pays for the maintenance and everything associated for people to visit that park however you want to have an event at a park and you want a facility reservation then you get charged a fee and within recreation programs we subsidized mostly at a hundred percent level programs that are a high priority for city council to provide to the community and make them and keep them accessible so our summer fun drop in program the after school sports program at the elementary schools those are some examples of fully subsidized programs and the fees that we set generally recover all of the direct costs to offer that activity and they contribute to the facility maintenance and operation they are not recovering fully all of the city's cost so a swim lesson at los bono's a dance class at  is not paying its fair share of the city's cost to maintain those facilities and that's you know we think that that's appropriate that's the cost that the city has for offering and maintaining those various recreation facilities mister white thank you and in this chart it shows that the administration administration division is ninety four percent subsidized but is that are we loading the recreation forty five percent with a portion of the administration costs or are we leaving all of those out and having the administration be an isolated bubble that's getting all of this  we do with everything else just as you were talking about previously there's a there's a general load put on each department to keep things going that of all them as you were saying our blah blah blah what are we just so we're doing apples to apples how are we this thank you and so the answer would be no this doesn't do a full spread then we wouldn't have administrative costs because it would be spread across all of the other divisions so the administrative costs are just the department administration and the recreation division includes management related to that division similar with parks so so it's not a true spread of cost for cost recovery but it's basically how our and it doesn't include any city overhead or anything like that it's just our straight cost i guess then i have to ask the question why isn't it a hundred percent subsidized where is a revenue stream for administration the administration revenue comes from because we manage all of our capital projects in the administration division and so some of those project management services are actually budgeted in the capital program so revenue from those programs comes into the administration division that's primarily it and then in trying to get to what you were looking for when we were last here we chose you wanted to know how the golf course as a recreation service compared to maybe some of the other recreation services so staff decided that it was probably cleanest to look at pool and the tennis courts and then the golf course and we looked at the and the slide doesn't have as much detail as your staff report  terms of you know all the different aspects that were included but you can see los llanos pool pool showers lockers weight room offices tennis courts  lights and shower and lockers and restrooms and and we have tennis courts at the municipal tennis facility we have tennis courts at pershing but the city doesn't pay for maintenance of those that's actually our joint use agreement with city college they maintain those courts the lights however our rs and the cost to operate the lights so that's in the tennis budget and we have the two cords at oak park so that comprises tennis and then golf you have the eighteen hole course the driving range the pro shop the restaurant restrooms etc so a fairly complex facility comparison almost i mean it's really interesting when i put this together and i looked at programs because all three entities do much of the same thing lessons camps clinics group activities they allow for casual drop in activities they do some facility rentals the golf course doesn't really do a facility rental the loss bono's pool is a supervised facility the tennis courts i would say are partially supervised and not really supervised at the level that the golf course and los bono's are both of those facilities don't operate without staff and or the concession staff and a supervisory capacity and you can go to city tennis courts and there's not a staff person there the audience is youth to seniors in each case they do special programs for all three youth adults and seniors you can see there's a big difference in cost we were able to isolate out the cost for los llanos from the aquatics budget so i think what you see there is pretty accurate and the revenue that's generated at los llanos and tennis and the general fund subsidy fifty six percent  and sixty eight percent with the tennis program and trying to get a rough idea of participation and this is not individuals so you know numerous people go to both of those all three of those facilities every you know our regular basis but vanya's has over a hundred thousand participation say year tennis this is rough because we have a lot of people who just show up and play but we're guessing probably about thirty eight thousand and gulf were going by the number of rounds so it just really is kind of a snapshot and  just shows a lot of similarities and some of the differences so everybody the hundred and five thousand people to go through loss vanya sent a sixty two thousand that goes through the golf you know those precisely because you can't get in without paying or you've a flash and the card the tennis says you mentioned is different because you can yeah how did you how did you come up with the thirty seven five some we asked the tennis services coordinator to go through all of her activities where she has registrations or regular league participation and so she totaled all of that up we looked at the annual permits and daily permits that are sold so we kind of came up with what we knew and what we thought was on top of that so if anything the tennis number is low the comment on that you were saying that there aren't any events at the golf  facility i would argue that it wouldn't be hard to get to the place where the the mulligan's events it contributes to the revenue and ends up helping the bottom line of the whole  facility in in some way and so that would be at least a kind of a bank shot event that's that's that's helpful to this i would agree and we didn't include any we didn't ask mulligan's for the number of people that attend their events so we really there is a nice revenue stream off of that facility which offsets some of the other activities yes and golf tournaments are included in the number of rounds so that's already include we did want to share with you some additional information that we've been gathering from some of our compatriots in the golf industry and in going through our our files we also found some  reports and studies that have been done and i've actually contacted the national golf foundation and asked them if they have some updated statistics on this as we're going through this so hopefully when we come to council w actually have some updated numbers but there was a report prepared by the national golf foundation called emerging trends a municipal golf that came out in december of two thousand and thirteen and they basically you know indicated that muny courses operated as enterprise funds were increasingly unable to meet their expenses and the trends that they were seeing because the national golf foundation also does consulting similar to pro forma golf that did our our golf consultant report the trends that they were seeing is increased outsourcing of golf operations andor golf course maintenance to a private operator forgiveness of large accumulated debt non accrued by the golf courses by the general fund and folding of golf operations back into the general fund so that was kind of interesting and just recently we did a little research and i will say these numbers that you see are from the  ir reports online from fiscal year two thousand and thirteen we're in the process of trying to get some updated information from both the city of oxnard in the city of ventura  now their golf courses are all operated under a contract and they have no city maintenance they are really some of our primary  competition they are known for being well run and competitively priced and they also have heavy debt related to capital investment the ventura courses were recently renovated  in the i want to say two thousand four or five something like that might have been a little bit later and subsidy has been provided by the general fund to each of these operations over the last few years and so the records for the city of oxnard the general fund provided one point three million in subsidy to that to the river ridge golf course which was about twenty seven percent of their operating costs and ventura similarly similarly half a million dollars which is about eleven percent so we're i mean it it's it's just interesting to gather some of this information and we'll be looking to see what they've done for fourteen and and what they're planning but clearly we are seeing similar trends so your senses in those two instances that that subsidy is related to forgiving capital debt well i think a couple things and comparing them to us just you know they're they're operated contracts so they don't have any city maintenance costs so that's one difference and they are similarly although i'm sure they had a financial plan that showed they could generate revenue with the capital investment and pay that back but they've seen all the same trends that we have with the decline in play and so they have had to rely on the general fund to help them out through this time  so that's what we understand their situation to be well that will be very helpful to know more about precisely because i think they're they're different in that they're you'd have the management contracts but they also have a capital debt that they're trying to deal with and we have the capital debt so i'd like to know and ironically they're subsidizing their operations with their manage contracts their subsidy is significant i mean it's those are big numbers and we have no subsidy so that's very interesting yeah we need to know why that is because if that if the management model is so much more efficient those why would those numbers be so big other than a capital cost  numbers are big because of the trends and golf that's affecting everyone and i think that's why their numbers are big they had the debt and then  a it's nothing more than a little add on to what mister hart's talking about is is is that are those numbers roughly a an offset of the payments of the debt payments being the four that that these courses are making is the one point three a they've got a debt of one three and of course maybe the same thing occurred where a general fund or a city money was loaned to that golf course and then they're paying it back so just it are those numbers how do they compare to the offset of the debt payment is it so as i said we've asked them for more information and we have not been able to get that but this is what their kafirs shows so just very quickly i the report  have from the consultant goes through all the different operating models i am not going to go through them extensively that's not the conversation that we're having now but i did want to just highlight some key points so santa barbara operates under a hybrid which is a name of a model we have city maintenance our golf operations which is the daily operation at the golf course through the pro shop is done by concession with chris t rico and food and beverage as a concession with mulligan's and then the city provides the management oversight and the strengths and weaknesses of each of those models and just very very briefly one of the strengths of our current model is that we have a high level of city control at the same time the limitations and the weaknesses are that with three entities invested in the success of the golf course it can become a challenge and we have limited ability to adapt and respond to a dynamic market we have potential conflicts of multiple concessionaires that's one of the challenges i have really appreciated the relationship that we've had with the director of golf mulligan's over the last few years but i know that they would agree with me that it's been difficult for us to agree on some of our marketing strategies and who pays for what and what's the loss leader and you know who benefits and and that's just to be expected because it's basically three businesses trying to come together to have a mutual decision and outcome and then of course we have the higher salary cost for public employees the next model is simply the city's model with the hybrid with contract maintenance and so that's basically the  one difference would be that we would have less investment in salary and benefits it would reduce our cost when i will just say i meant to say that working with our consultant we did ask  him what percent of courses were which models and he is most familiar with southern california so these numbers reflects southern california so six percent of the municipal courses are the city's model six percent are the city's model with contract maintenance and then moving on to the management agreement sorry the management agreement has a private operator for all four entities essentially the city would contract with a professional golf management company and they would manage the golf course for the city it would be for a designated management fee and then with revenue enhancements incentives and the revenues and the expenses are still the city's expenses but the management company is providing those services so not using city employees for any of those services this is the most common model being adopted by municipal golf courses in today's market the trend that has been that we've been hearing about and that golf consultants are saying is that this is the direction that a lot of companies are a lot of cities are going to and twenty three percent of the ministry minutes municipal courses in southern california are under the management agreement model so the benefits are you have one entity running a professional providing professional golf management services you have the private sector wage and benefit structure those are your pluses on the downside we retain our level of financial risk for the city and it requires still for the city to have some level of management the cities that we've talked to you that have this model they still have somebody who's doing the contract management on the cities and to make sure that it's still operating in benefit to the city the last model model that we would spend much time on today is the facility lease this is the least common model used today although you will see that fifty seven per cent of the municipal courses have this model most of those leases were established many years ago with twenty to thirty year terms and the leases are generally used when the private entity is being asked to invest a significant amount of capital into the course so we're not seeing that that represents what the situation is for the city of santa barbara so but you can see how it differs and and i think in the chart and the information in the in the report is pretty self aligned self explanatory and the last model is included in the consultants report but it's not something that staff are seeing is financially feasible given the golf market today and that would be full self operation and there are courses that are still i'm albeit a limited number of cities that do a full self operation including food and beverage and the pro shop and maintenance so the consultant put together various economic comparisons looking at the different models and based on the figures that you see those are rough numbers the best that we could put together working with the consultant based on what we knew for city expenses and his familiarity with the golf industry and similar agreements  you can see that it the difference would range between roughly two hundred to four hundred thousand dollars a year to the city depending on the model you take that number and you apply it back to that table where we show the structural deficit and how that would change it comes into play the biggest difference being that in the last three models you don't have public employee salary and benefit costs and that's the main difference and we did have  a discussion with the city attorney as to whether or not the living wage applied when the consultant was doing his report we did not have a determination from the city attorney and it is his opinion  reviewing the living wage ordinance itself it does exempt contracted service for recreation sir of which we would consider operating the golf course the  being a recreation service so of course that would be a council decision but that's where where we are at this time so just again gives you some numbers if if council is interested in exploring this further we'll come back with additional information so i wanted to also let you know where we are staff made a presentation and provided all of this information that you receive today to the golf advisory committee at their meeting earlier i guess last week and then tomorrow we are giving the parks and recreation commission a status report on this discussion we feel that there is a lot of interest in the community for what's going on so we're just keeping people in the loop and providing information we are going to city council for direction on december th we've scheduled it at six zero p m so that people who are interested can attend and again we need direction staff need direction no later than june two thousand and fifteen and we are asking the finance committee today first off if there is additional information that you would like when this comes to city council please let us know anything that you haven't already mentioned and we are asking that you provide a recommendation to city council for how staff should move forward with addressing the financial challenges before the golf course and we're happy the self funded courses that's just kind of trying to muddle my way along this pile and i see for example that los angeles county has five self operated courses but and i'm calling is it somewhere like sunnyvale was the only sort of comparable sized community that does it i'm presuming then that in the case of los angeles county it's like communities out there so that they million here million there it's not a not concern to them at this point but i am just trying to look for the you know straightest apples comparison of of course and of course you you talked about the ventura ones and maybe that's why you you gave as much information about that is that in your view the closest comparison to our situation here just because it's it's a competitor i suppose that's another reason why committee member white i think in the consultants report he compared he selected a number of courses that were local that really compared best to santa barbara and he used those he separates them out also by northern california and southern california so i think there's a lot of information in there on comparisons and like i said we'll have him be present at the council meeting and he can speak more specifically yeah i felt like i got i found myself being confused in this collection of material as often as i was being enlightened and so that's i guess that's not a question just as a lot of information yeah and there's so many variables that are being presented to us that it's hard to get it down to a to a they used my primitive terms of apples apples to apples so i'm gonna be at the pre questioning mode for the moment mister chair until i hear what their folks mister ark you have any questions i just had one question in looking at the management agreement information revenue and expense information what is the standard industry profit margin for those management agreements that would be a question for our consultant i don't think that i would feel comfortable and  we'll ask him to come prepared to answer that i do know that since we've been having this kind of conversation with the consultant and we've actually used this consultant in the last few times that the city has gone out with an rfp for the director of golf or renegotiated the director of golf salaries our contracts rather that those those  minimum payments have actually declined so as the golf industry is declining and fewer people are playing then those contracts have become less favorable to the city than the once were but it is that would be a transparent number i mean it's a public documents you can know precisely exactly what we're talking about okay thank you okay thank you very much are there any members of the public wishing to speak on this topic please lecture and please state your name for the record afternoon thank you for letting me speak today my main concern is about aims sir excuse me david niles i am a resident of santa barbara and the reason i'm here today is basically to not because i'm concerned about any public park being leased to a private for profit group and i think basically the narrowness of the report largely focuses on this is a hundred and eight acre park in the center of santa barbara that's currently being used for golf and so i would say prior to prior a private group it should be the obligation of the city to look at all alternatives for this one hundred and eight acre park in the middle of santa barbara soccer baseball picnics any other revenue generating activities that could be hybridized and so and basically the methodology of a private lease in the form of a very pointed report to three member financial committee that's going to refer to the city council about the decision of a possible private lease of a public park i think is excluding public comment public education public input and any creative ideas the public could bring to the table so i feel like the public's being circumvented when a few people in a midday finance committee then a consent calendar hearing at city council make a decision about the private lease and a twenty to thirty year fate of our public park so i hope the golf survives i support subsidizing the golf and keeping it within the city park system and that prior to any consideration of a private lease of our public parks that all viable alternatives other than golf we be studied and reported back to the community and and i think the city the city of santa barbara the citizens should have a just like today a better forum and there should be meetings and we should be able to have input on what our public parks are used for so if golf isn't sustainable let's create another use because there is a myriad of uses that the city of santa barbara public could come up with in that beautiful setting so appreciate your time today and please reject any private lease of our public parks thank you thank you anyone else wishing to speak please come forward  we've got two folks go ahead hi and your name is my name is brian henson i currently sit on the golf course advisory committee as well as in the newly formed players and proven that fund subcommittee and i am also a marshal of nearly ten years at the golf course the city of santa barbara is a destination location and muni with its rich history and spectacular views can also be a destination location revitalization is required to keep local golfers interested and t entice out of town play as is the case in the newly renovated ventura courses after reviewing the status report i realized that the decision before you is a difficult one while i recognize the substantial savings from contracting out maintenance i fear the loss of a superintendent would be detrimental to muniz greatest asset it's greens i fear the inevitable lack of maintenance if contracted would further drive down play simi hills learned this lesson returned and returned to city maintenance from a contract management and i know this not from the report which it states in there but from personal communications with the president of simi hills men's golf club during the recent competition torrey pines in harding park are two examples of enter prise funds like muni both are renowned destination courses i wonder how much the cities of san francisco and san diego have invested into their communities while santa barbara golf club there's no pines it does have the potential to be a truly great gem revitalization is already in progress through the players improvement fund and slated capital improvements while the immediate numbers are bleak the near future is bright and i urge the committee to consider subsidizing potential losses as it is done with the loss panos pool and tennis courts the drought and economy have weakened muniz fiscal outlook however a cut in service and golf course care could be the final blow thank you thank you very much that some of these numbers you got to put them a perspective the sixty mm that is a lot of play one hundred zero was extraordinary the average i've read is about thirty thirty five thousand for golf courses so this course should be able to be sustaining and it is a good golf course it's not great but it's good and it's an asset to the city and more people use it than just the golf i mean that mulligan's is a community location it's got a beautiful spot people from all ages and businessmen retirees people go there for lunch they go there to hang out this is a major part of the city landscape i really think when you look at these alternatives i respect what he said but i think you can do the maintenance i mean when you're paying nine hundred thousand go million a year compared with the numbers i saw in the paper four or five hundred thousand double the amount of cost that that's it in a nutshell you just can't sustain you you need a course that is sustainable and sustainable means you can't have city workers i mean you have to there's a lot of issues to be contended with there but you have to have the model that allows the course to be sustainable i don't think you need to subsidize it i think you need to change the structure of the maintenance because that's extraordinary amount of money i think you can do it without losing good maintenance if you have the right kind of contract and that's the way it should go because that course you know it's i play it once  and the men's club is active there's a lot of people that go there it's a again it's a great asset to the city it needs to be put on a different footing so that this conversation doesn't take place every year or two thank you thank you very much any other speakers please hoek i'm a local physician i'm also a member of the las positas tennis group and i just want to be sure that what happened to the las positas tennis facility doesn't happen to the golf course we had our court foundation private entity and we don't want the same thing to happen to the golf course city charter five hundred and twenty states that no land acquired by the city or dedicated to public park or recreation purposes shall be sold lease or otherwise transferred unless authorized by affirmative votes of at least a majority of the electors voting on such proposition at a general or special election so any lease of the santa barbara municipal golf course a public recreation facility must therefore be approved by the voters don't let what happened to the las positas tennis facility happen to the golf course our courts were given to elaine's park foundation in a simple calendar consent vote i watched the tapes by the city council there was no discussion at all during these meetings during this transfer there was no public input why doesn't parks and recreation have a public meeting involving the golfing community to look at options for how the golf course could be more profitable an example might be having only a nine hole golf course which would mean less maintenance costs this type of meeting should have occurred with the now displaced tennis players at the las positas we would gladly have paid a little more for passes or paid for the nightlights and but that wasn't given as that option wasn't given to us huge decisions over multi million dollar assets are being made without proper public notification or input thank you for your time thank you any other comments okay back to the  afternoon my name is pete lamantia and i help coordinate junior programs at the municipal golf course and i just want to say you know for the kids this place is just phenomenal i think in the past four years or so that i've worked there we've probably seen most of our programs like the first tee the cross morison program double in activity a lot more course play for the kids you know they'll come out tournaments as well they work with santa barbara junior golf that's the summer program we have a couple of our events that are hosted at muni and we have well over one hundred and ten kids in that program alone for the summer the future of golf you know you think about what attracts people i grew up around in the s or so when you couldn't get a reservation on the golf course unless you were just johnny on the spot made that phone call it's six o'clock in the morning i understand one hundred thousand plays but that's off the charts that would be filling up every single tea time imaginable i mean right now you're looking at something probably like about six hours you're still full tee times for the sixty two zero plays that you're munich and it seems like from what i was trying to learn today approximately like four hundred thousand dollars the committee fields could be achieved by changing the structure of how the course is run but i'd like to submit like the junior program is growing what a lot you know with the adult programs types of things that we can do to attract more people into the golf course i think we're only looking at maybe about a ten percent increase maybe thirty more plays a day under the current model and breaking even or even the possibility of raising the green fees just a couple of dollars but adding a few more programs to it so people wouldn't say wow it went up two dollars did say hey look we're even getting more for what we're paying for it muni so i just like to throw that on the table this is another way to you know take a look at the situation that you have in front of you as i don't think the numbers when i seek two one million to two million that's not a big discrepancy i mean i'd be worried about if it was a shortfall of life a half a million dollars or something and that that amount but i don't think we're that far away livelihoods and jobs are being put on the line right now you've been given a proposal to contract out their jobs and we are in opposition to that i think you'll find if you look over examples where this has occurred in other places that you don't get the same quality you don't get the same devotion you don't have the same control and when you have an enterprise that needs all of those things you should stick with the public employees that are doing a fine job and are not responsible for the shortcomings that you're being asked to address thank you thank you very much any other public comment okay back to the committee for our comments mister hart what do you have to say well i really appreciate you bringing this item forward i think that you're being very wise and cautious looking ahead i think i understand this better now where we are in this inflection point and i don't think that we have a crisis at all i think we have a tremendous asset that lots of people are taking advantage of and we're bucking bigger trends this is a lot of similarities that we've run into at the airport where they're just national phenomenon that are affecting us in terms of air service and despite the best efforts of the airport staff to add flights there you know the industry is changing and we're trying to adapt to that so the same thing is occurring here  i you know as far as i'm concerned i don't i don't think that the right answer is to fully privatize the golf course i think there may be some opportunities with the the management agreement model that would be a hybrid that would involve keeping city employees and having potentially the other services operated under one contract i've talked to a lot of people about the in this business and i keep hearing the word synergy that may come from you know cross promotions and and doing loss leader situations with food and beverages or other or the other way to boost revenue at the restaurant things like that on the other hand you know i see in the report from the consultant that the restaurant actually is doing very well and so it made i don't know that there's synergy in that context i there may be synergy on the golf side but it might be at the expense of the operation of the restaurant but i do understand how those connect and i think there's something to be looked at in that  and more conversations to be had about that model fundamentally i think this comes down to a kind of a philosophical thing you know are we going to privatize and assume the cost of the profit involved in having you know these operations privatized at the expense of city employees and philosophically you know i'm not going to go there but i would like to know more about the reality of this general fund subsidy that's occurring around us you know these golf courses in ventura county because the fact that the golf fund is an enterprise fund is the only reason that these capital expenditures are debt to the golf as opposed to any other recreation program those would all be capital projects that would be coming from the city's general fund and if we didn't have that debt service we wouldn't be having this conversation even with i think some of the fairly aggressive declines in use i mean if we put that chart back up and we pulled out three hundred thousand dollars a year in debt service payments we would be in the black for the full ten years under most of those pessimistic golf writers our users play scenarios so i i think you know just from sent a fairness standpoint golf was created as an enterprise fund because it was profitable and folks that were in the golf community wanted to retain the revenues from golf and have that reinvested in the golf operation made perfect sense at that time that apparently doesn't seem to be the trend any longer and so having golf  under the obligation of having that one hundred percent subsidy separate from every other parks and recreation program seems like a very large burden to carry when in fact what we're really talking about is people having fun recreative one way or the other whether they're swimming at the pool whether they're playing tennis where they're playing golf whether they're dancing at cabrillo ballroom they're all just the same kind of activities and it was striking to when misra put the chart on there what happens at each of these facilities the same thing happens  differently so i think that's the most fair way to look at this is really to say the city provides recreation to improve the quality of life of residents there's a lot of people that use this golf course and this is this is the core of their recreational experience and i want to protect that to the greatest extent possible and i think you're being wise and smart and putting all this stuff on the table but but i don't other than the fact that we have these leases coming up in two thousand and sixteen i don't i don't see the crisis i see being looking ahead in planning and carefully ahead but the urgency of that is different in my mind then i think the public may feel because of the you know the disconnect between having a conversation and being smart and planning ahead and then the impression in the public being we're gonna do something drastic with the golf course for example mister niles you know concern that or even interest perhaps and turning the golf course into something else i mean that that's not even on the table at all in my mind under any circumstances this is a completely valid viable recreational resource we're going to keep it that way we're just going to try and figure out how to either subsidize it or make it more efficient through and my stories i heard was that there was the city santa barbara had a municipal golf course before the great depression before the crash the great depression and the city lost it it basically went bankrupt and was lost and we now low these now ninety years later we have a course and i am certainly intent upon maintaining a full fledged golf course there i think that's it's a it's a neat resource and it's part of our array of  facilities that that we present here so i appreciate i think they're the creativity of you know we are also very short on play fields this is our perhaps our largest single shortage is is in the area of play field so i appreciate the the creativity of trying to come up with an alternative strategy but from from my perspective a this is you when you break this up youuuu shatter it you don't just keep keep a anything resembling golf going and i think also there's a possibility that one of these private courses will cease to exist competing private courses in the area will cease to exist in reasonable time so those are so i'm optimistic i'm going to just be consistent more on the optimistic end of golf on this course am interested in and i'm also interested in the city maintaining substantial control over it i hear miss rapp that there are there are situations where there's difficulty in the three or entities coordinating and i mean i want to hear more about that and how and why  there would be benefits in there being fewer than three the they seem to be three sort of focal areas and so it seems to me that that that's how i would look at it if i were sort of going going forward with managing but i want to hear more about okay you say that there are problems there are there problems to be solved by there being you know both the golf and the restaurant being being contracted out together shall we say but as i say from my perspective at least though there should be city direct involvement in the managing of this operation i think it's  there's less of a crisis i think as as mister hart said then then we've we've heard about the area where i am interested in improving our bottom line is in contracting out some services is there a way to run this as we've seen all throughout southern california is there a way to do some of the work with contract and i'm interested to see that the living wage is brought in as a as a a piece of this puzzle even though it's not a requirement that becomes at least a a something to discuss i haven't been i've been sort of skeptical about the living wage activity and yet waiting to hear how it is playing out i know a study is is supposed to happen one of these years about about its  ect but that's at least one way to to to look at the contracting out of some services in order to make this not a subsidized operation i think that one of the reasons why we see it the numbers that we see today is i think it's been pretty darn well run for a number of years i would imagine that's what happened in ventura is people either used to consume some of the resources there in some fashion and created a debt in the past as we have seen in other situations in our financial system here and then and the other ingredient was excessive optimism at some point ten  twelve years ago saying you know wow golf is going up three percent a year let's let's dump millions of dollars into the into the course and then now the piper needs to be paid for that so i would like to see this course breaking even i don't i don't think it needs to be a big revenue generator for the city i think it it needs to be it should be a a revenue neutral operation and so that would be one way that i could see getting  it will not be easy for this community to provide a recommendation to city council on how staff should move forward but i think that we've we have the information here that we need to make a decision i agree with mister white that the goal should be for the golf course to be self sustaining in terms of finances i think it can be whatever whatever adjustments that may require and i know that we've talked about  possibility of contracting out maintenance as an obvious possibility since that's what most golf courses in this situation do that's something that we should look at and for miss gawain is benefit we've talked about this before and the idea would not be to put these people out on the street but find other positions for them within the city that seems like the most obvious move to me  and that's what i think city council should look at but i think that the the golf course plays a significant enough role in the city's recreation program and the history of the city that this is really something that the full council is going to have to evaluate and come to a decision on i also agree with one of the members of the public who mentioned that he believes that this is something that needs full public discussion obviously i agree with that as well and it we'll be we don't need to come to a final decision on this until we approve a budget so we do have ample time to schedule public outreach public workshops and i think that should  assuming that at some point council would direct us to go out and do more public outreach we would probably do a combined golf advisory committee parks and recreation commission large meeting so we if that is the direction to gather more public input then that's that's what we're thinking would take place well and i just i just totally agree with with the comments that have been made about making sure that we get this word out as broad as possible and get as much input as possible that that is definitely it's important and this is a big deal to our community so absolutely i support that and i would make the the motion that the finance committee recommends that the golf course that th path that that is taken for the golf course be a self sustaining one over the long term i feel like not sure that mister hart agrees with that but that would be at least one thing that well i we savings is in a maintenance contract so that would be the motion that i would make okay well i guess the only thing i would say is that i don't think we are i personally am not ready to make a motion like that i think that there were a number of questions that we had today that i'd like more information about before i'm moving forward i think one of the other interesting aspects of this report that we didn't talk about at all was demographic change in the community in relation to golf and there's there's a section of the report that talks about you know the baby boomer population retiring being having more time available having more disposable income per capita than other communities i think that's a potential source of increased play at the golf course that we didn't talk about that that makes us perhaps a little bit different i don't know why the the consultant didn't evaluate that more and come to more conclusions i mean informations there but there really wasn't anything in the report that said well because of that we will do better than other areas or not and then i just find i find all of that stuff missing from making a decision at this point in time and so i think and again i i think everybody here agrees this is a really important question and it deserves full vetting and public information i don't understand the timetable that we're rushing toward i don't know why we need to have this in council on december th you know i think again this is the decision point has been next june i'd rather take more time and have this vetted better than moving forward on this timetable that we have in front of us okay sure i will i will second the motion thank you and i will also add that i think that bringing this before council in december will facilitate public discussion not cut it off and that this will just be the first of many discussions on this topic i'm sure that's just where i was gonna go is that this is getting it to council means just a broader exposure of the issue which i think is i mean this is this a this is this is one of the best attended finance committee meetings we've ever had so thank you all of you for showing up by the way today for this and this is if we can just keep this growing through several sessions i think getting to council starts to accomplish that i appreciate the questions you're asking about demographics my reading of the demographic material in here was was that that we boomers are are fizzling enough so that we're not playing as much  golf as we used to but i'm open to hearing more you know study and having having you ask i appreciate the point you're coming from and and i know that your brain will come up with more tough questions on this issue and i look forward to those questions being asked and and that all of us struggling with it because this needs to be a fully vetted conversation and in the meantime we have a motion on the table all those in favor aye opposed motion passes two to one ladies and gentlemen thank you very much thank you very much for being here today city council starts in sick