In 2010 while serving as the president of the Del Webb Sun Cities Museum, we built a website and i wrote a backside blog called Sun Cities Today. That site is long gone, but the blog is floating around on the net. With the furor over the huge increase in golf rates it sent me scurrying to find an article i wrote in 2011 regarding a comparative analysis between early 196o rates and what a similar player would be paying some 50 years later. Dang i found it and will post a link for it at the bottom of the page but i have cut out the most interesting paragraph below. It makes makes a comparison between a Sun City golfer living here in 1961 and one in 2011. They both play equal amounts: 4 days mid week (Mon-Fri) and one weekend day (Sat or Sunday). They take two weeks off for vacation a year so that equates 250 rounds per year (50x5). In 1961, a weekend day had a premium (yes i used exact information from a picture hanging at the North course pro shop). The first thing you should note, the full play pass in 2011 was $1450 (it's gone up a whopping $100 since that time). For the record, that's 40 cents a round on the 250 rounds. Otherwise here's the breakout: "Our neighbor from the 1960’s gets the choice of 1 course, 1 round per day. So you don’t think i’m using fuzzy math, his yearly costs look like this: 200 weekday rounds @ $2.75 comes out to $550.00. Add in the 50 weekend rounds @ $3.50 and you have another $175.00 for a total of $725.00. Exactly 50 years later, our golfer from 2011 would be paying $26.00 a round as a resident. But wait; under our own devices to promote play and lower costs, we have the year-long pass that comes in at a neat $1450.00. To put it into perspective on a per round cost basis it equates to this: 1960; $725.00 divided by 250 rounds equals $2.90 per round. For the 2011 golf fanatic, it would come out to this: $1450.00 divided by the same 250 round Interesting eh? The daily walk-on round was $26 in 2011 and is now $35 while the full play pass was $1450 and has ballooned all the way to $1550. Yikes. You can read the article here. For some reason the link won't load, try clicking this: https://suncitiestoday.wordpress.com/2011/11/25/go-figure/
Damn, dredging up that old site put a smile on my face. There are some 100 columns posted and until the end, i stayed fairly lucid. Odd when you think about it, i joined the board right at the end of my term in 2011 as president of the Museum. If you ever can't sleep at night, there's lots of material written when i was younger and far more passionate about the community.
The more times i read this 2011 story, the more the reality of our challenges of ever being resolved move further away.
