Columnist Dean Juipe: City’s golf deals reek of favoritism

Dean Juipe

Friday, Oct. 5, 2001 | 10:48 a.m.

Dean Juipe's column appears Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. His boxing notebook appears Thursday. Reach him at juipe@lasvegassun.com or 259-4084.

Built in a hardscrabble neighborhood and ostensibly with the most benevolent of purposes, the Desert Pines golf course sharply contrasts with its immediate surroundings.

It's plush, with innumerable transplanted trees and a green, green hue to its landscape.

But its business and residential colleagues along Bonanza and Pecos roads offer no such visual amenities. They're pavement gray, or dusty brown.

Homeless men and women can still be seen in the area, just as they were when Desert Pines was being built within the confines of a sturdy fence that continues to separate the haves from the have-nots. The golf course is its own little gated community.

Yet it was built, city officials said at the time, to provide its serving area with an affordable course that would not only fill a recreational need but would encourage additional growth and redevelopment near its downtown site. For those reasons, the City of Las Vegas donated the land to Walters Golf and struck a deal in which it settles for a portion of the course's profits.

But unless your name is Bill Walters, it's entirely possible the golf course and its underlying incentives have failed on all counts.

Want to play there today? On top of the downright aggravating requirement that locals pay a $20 annual fee for a "resident's card," the greens fee is $56; it's $125 for nonresidents.

Set aside the fact that a Nevada driver's license should suffice as proof of residency, at $76 (or $56 for those already with a card) the course is hardly affordable and certainly not conducive to fulfilling the needs of its original intent. It seems probable that not one person from that neck of the woods has taken up golf because of his or her proximity to Desert Pines, just as it's likely that few if any of the people that live near the course have the disposable funds to play it on any sort of regular basis.

It can be argued that the city did little beyond adding to Walters' bank account.

And, hey, it just did it again.

Acting against the recommendation of its own staff, City Council voted this week to work with the Bureau of Land Management and furnish Las Vegas-based Walters Golf with another parcel of real estate that will result in an 18-hole golf course (and 9.8-acre park) at Gowan Road and Durango Drive on the city's northwest side. Council made this questionable move in spite of having a less-expensive proposal from a competing course-development firm from Dallas that operates 40 courses nationally.

As a result, Walters Golf will receive $277,675 per year (growing to $422,560 annually by the 10th year) in management fees from the city, even though the Dallas company was asking for only $96,000 in annual fees (growing to $125,258 annually after 10 years).

Councilman Larry Brown led the crusade to accept the Walters bid even if it (unnecessarily) results in the city paying millions of dollars in fees to Walters that it would not have had to pay to the Dallas firm.

One can only assume that Brown will be "taken care of" when he and his cronies want to play the new course when it's done, or any of the other six Walters operates in town.

If only the people who live around these courses were so lucky.