City golf course scores a “bogey” with financial losses

The Desert Hills Golf Course is expected to have losses of $585,319 for the 2016-2017 fiscal year.

Adding a budget deficit of $139,894 from previous years, the golf course is expected to be $725,213 in the red by June 30th.

Therefore, the City of Yuma is planning on giving the golf course $500,000 to get out of the hole, something they’ve been doing for several years.

According to the city’s preliminary budget outline for the 2017-2018 fiscal year, “The Two Percent Tax was used to construct the course and later to reconstruct the main clubhouse, through debt service. The tax has also been used to subsidize course operations from time to time, but Council has long intended that golf revenues wholly support these operations. To this end the transfer of the tax has been reduced over the years.”

“In FY12 and FY14, new transfers from the Two Percent Tax fund fund were used to fund capital project improvements to the golf courses and their clubhouses. For FY15, an additional transfer was budgeted to support operations. Also in FY15, an additional transfer was budgeted to support operations,” the outline continues.

According to City Administrator Greg Wilkinson, things are starting to turn around.

“The course now is probably in the best shape it’s been in a long time,” Wilkinson explained,”We have a two-year business plan to try to get it back to even and that’s really where we’d like to be. Supplementing it with a little bit of two-percent, I don’t think, is out of the question. We are on the right path.”

The City is budgeting an additional $250,000 going towards the golf course for the 2017-18 fiscal year.

However, Councilman Gary Wright says he voted against the City’s Preliminary Budget cap because he’s concerned about the losses being sustained at the golf course.

“We can’t afford losses like this,” Wright explained, “For Parks and Recreation, we have to do something different, and we can not continue. It’s a structural deficit that we get on the revenues for Parks and Recreation compared to the expenditures.”

According to Wright, the city won’t be able to continue eating the losses for much longer.

“My concern is that the hospitality tax revenues are stagnant and they’re not growing. If you don’t have growth in the revenue of the hospitality tax that the voters voted in and your expenditures exceed your revenues, you have structural imbalance and that causes me great concern,” Wright said.

The City’s Two-Percent tax revenues for fiscal year 2015-16 were $5,007,109. The projected amount for the 2016-17 fiscal year are about $5,300,000.

However, City Administrator Greg Wilkinson says that the golf course is an asset to the community.

“It’s a Parks and Recreation function. We have parks, we don’t make money on parks. We don’t make money on pools. We put more money into pools… We don’t make money on baseball fields and soccer fields,” Wilkinson explained, “That doesn’t mean that you want to go out there and shut them down. Those are quality of life that our community has known.”

“The Parks and Recreation Department, we have a lot of different parks. That’s a quality of life,” Wright said, “However, there is a stopping point, when the losses get so great. Then you have to rethink about what you’re providing an that’s when the leadership comes in and hopefully your leadership doesn’t give you excuses. It gives you solutions.”