Been trying to comment on the “Blame Del Webb” thread, but site keeps telling me an error as message more than 10,000 characters. My replies are no where near 10,000 characters. Only Bill and Say What may be close to that. Don’t see anywhere I can fix this.
Still not working on Blame Del Webb post. So I will state my comments here. To SayWhat: I agree with you on the lawn bowling, except I would only eliminate or move the MV lawn bowling. This would provide for more parking and/or pickleball courts at MV. To Bill:For the story being told, it seemed that though there were fee increases for golf, the walk ons would still be subsidizing the others. The full play passes could be raised much higher. My story— Either raise this fee or close a course or two. Too much money otherwise to keep up the courses.
Thanks for your comments here Tom, no idea why you can't post on the thread in question, others have. You did get the story exactly right, the daily walk-on golfers have been the cash cow to subsidize the pass buyers. We can call it a different philosophical business model from Sun City West or we could become more jaundiced and call is something far more ugly. Where this gets really challenging is when we look at the high season (Nov-April) and the small group bookings posted on the golf calendar start taking many of the available tee times. Then throw in those accustomed to using the lottery system (who also get bumped a lot) and there's little to be had. We know Janet Curry has told us if she wants to golf in high season she often will go to one of former private country clubs (now open for public play) and pay far more but at least knowing she can get a tee time and a cart. There's no easy answers to any of this, but as we move down the path to finding solutions, the one that isn't practical is to elect a majority of board members who will condense the PIF into a single fund and the devote massive amounts of money into golf. We've been there, we've done that and we are still in a community with average golf courses. Plus we already know when the 5th water management plan hits in 2025 we are on the hook for ten's of millions of dollars with desert landscaping conversions from our PIF.
Now that would be a violation of their fiduciary responsibilities especially with the documentation on the sale of the courses to the RCSC requiring golf to be self-sustaining. The only good news is we can now collect signatures on RCSC property and we have many more Members who don't play golf. If Sun City goes into decline, so does our property values and the incentive for new buyers.
