After years of financial woes, Oakmont Golf Club will go up for sale

Tom Woodrum’s house in Oakmont Village backs up to the fourth hole of the Oakmont Golf Club, a 354-yard par 4 that has not been particularly good to him through the years.

If your drive ends up in the pine trees on the right, he warns, “you’re dead.” The green runs downhill, left to right. Woodrum doesn’t care to admit the number of times he’s watched his putts roll past the cup and off the green.

And yet he’d miss that hole, if it were gone. In a turn of events that has rocked this 55-plus community of 4,700 people, the golf club informed its 260 members in mid-February that it soon will be for sale.

These days, one of the most popular activities at the self-described “active adult community” is speculating on what will become of the golf club, which consists of two 18-hole courses laid out over 225 acres in the heart of Oakmont Village. Built in 1964, the Oakmont Golf Club is a business separate from the Oakmont Village Association.

In a sobering memo sent to his constituents on March 5, Association President Steve Spanier cut directly to the chase, recounting a presentation made to golf club members by Steve Ekovich, a senior vice president of the real estate brokerage colossus Marcus & Millichap. Failed golf courses, Ekovich informed them, reduce home values by 20 to 30 percent for properties not on the golf course, and an estimated 30 to 40 percent for homes bordering the course.

“The failure of the golf course,” warned Spanier, “has the potential to reduce cumulative Oakmont property valuations by over half a billion dollars.”

The golf course debate is stoking passions in a community already renowned for recreation-related strife. In recent years, clashes over a controversial, $310,000 pickleball complex led to the resignations of two association presidents, its general manager, attorney, information technology coordinator and treasurer. At the height of that battle, a sergeant-at-arms was needed to keep order at association meetings. In August 2017, then-Board President Ken Heyman found the severed head of a rat in a bag on his doorstep. He resigned five months later.

“The golf club issue has the potential to dwarf pickleball in terms of community polarization,” Spanier said. “But we’re intent not to have that happen.”

Owned by its members, the vast majority of whom live in the village, the golf club has lost money or barely broken even four of the last six years, said its president, Gary Smith. It’s also carrying just over $3 million in long-term debt. At the same meeting when that impending sale was announced, club members were asked to approve a one-time $750 assessment on themselves. They did, and those funds are now being used to cover last year’s operating deficit and pay overdue bills to vendors, Smith said.

The club’s financial woes have been no secret. On Feb. 26, 2018, a standing room-only crowd filled the village’s East Rec Center. The subject of the meeting: “Economic Benefits of the Golf Club to the Community of Oakmont.”

Residents were reminded that, in addition to boosting property values, the courses provide drainage, scenic open space and a fire break. Then came the ask.

To raise $1.5 million for sorely needed upgrades, residents were asked to pay an additional five dollars a month for five years, a total of $300. Branded a “bailout” by critics, the request was swiftly rejected.

A year later, the club is for sale and the association on the cusp of losing control of a large tract of land running through it.

In Spanier’s worst-case scenario, the golf club goes bankrupt and becomes the property of an insurance company, which in turn sells the land to a real estate developer. Fairways and greens disappear, replaced by condos and townhouses. That five-bucks-a-month appeal is striking many Oakmonters, in retrospect, as highly reasonable.

That sum of $1.5 million, incidentally, is precisely the amount the club will be requiring prospective buyers to commit to spending to improve the facilities - primarily the Quail Inn restaurant and banquet facilities, “which haven’t been upgraded in 20 years,” Smith said.

“If a new buyer doesn’t commit to that,” he said, “I doubt very seriously membership would approve the sale.”

“Otherwise, they’re just buying the same problems we have.”

Spanier and the association’s board, meanwhile, are trying to figure out a way to keep the golf club in the family. In its March 13 meeting, “the board agreed to continue to seriously explore, with alacrity and thoroughness, the option of purchasing the OGC,” Spanier shared in an email. “We’ll continue our due diligence until we decide whether to make an offer.”

To bid, or not to bid? That’s the question facing - and dividing - Oakmonters, who pay $75 a month to use the village’s amenities, which include pools, tennis courts, health facilities, an auditorium and library.

Count Woodrum, whose backyard is the fourth fairway, among those willing to pony up a little more a month to control the destiny of the golf course. “It doesn’t make any sense that we would give that property up, to an outside developer or even another golf course operator, without a fight.”

How about villagers who don’t play golf, or live alongside the course. What do they stand to lose?

“About $100,000 of equity in their house,” he said.

Skeptics suspect that reports of plunging home values, should the golf course go to weeds - as has happened in recent years to golf clubs in Petaluma and Wikiup - are greatly exaggerated. Others feel strongly that the association has no business propping up a failing club.

“The fact is,” writes Bruce Bon in the Oakmont Observer, an online neighborhood publication, “most of us didn’t move here because of the golf courses, and would be little affected if they were replaced by other acceptable open-space uses. Unlike desert communities, where the only significant attraction is golf, our location in the Valley of the Moon is premier, with or without golf.”

Harry Polley disagreed. “I’m not a golfer,” said Polley, sitting in his Jeep outside the Activities Center, “but if I had to pay more to keep the golf club here, I would.”

People moving to the village “want to think they’re coming into a vibrant community,” he said. A failed golf course “sends a different message.”

Should the golf course fail, Woodrum said, “the stench of failure attaches to Oakmont.”

Waiting her turn at a nearby shuffleboard court, Joanne Nez said she’d be OK with kicking in “an extra ten or twenty bucks a month” to save the golf club, but only if it allowed Oakmonters to go for evening walks around its perimeter, a practice now prohibited.

Regardless of what happens, she said, “I just hope they find a way to keep it green.”

You can reach Staff Writer Austin Murphy at 707-521-5285 and austin.murphy@pressdemocrat.com.