Councillors tee off for city golf courses
Wednesday, April 15th, 2009
City Councillor Paula Fletcher, a left-winger who chairs the parks committee, once led the Manitoba Communist Party and lately has fought against a Wal-Mart in her ward – might seem an unlikely champion for Toronto’s five city-owned golf courses.
But before teeing off yesterday in a city tournament to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Etobicoke’s Humber Valley golf course, she said the city’s affordable municipal courses, most of which date back to the 1950s, have helped keep golf from becoming a sport reserved for the wealthy.
“These golf courses are not set up for an elite,” Ms. Fletcher said at a ceremony at the first tee, recalling courses when she started playing that forbade women on Saturdays.
“They do not have elite rules … they are for everyone. They’re open. It’s very democratic.”
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Glendale Golfs Transcona Manitoba
Winnipeg Tropical Paradise Theme Hotels Room
Glendale Golfs Transcona Manitoba
Winnipeg Tropical Paradise Theme Hotels Room
Whenever the city faces a financial crunch, as it did last summer, questions are raised about why the city of Toronto is in the golf business. Councillor Doug Holyday, a member of the pricey private St. George’s golf club, has called for the city to lease out its courses to private companies instead of maintaining them itself. (Management of the courses’ pro shops is already farmed out.)
It’s an idea Ms. Fletcher – who may have shanked her first drive to the left yesterday but usually ends up closer to the middle of fairway, in golf as in politics – is quick to shoot down.
For one thing, she says, the courses bring in more than $1.2-million in profits to the city each year.
“Why you would sell something that makes you money, I don’t know,” Ms. Fletcher said in an interview, adding that owning the courses means the city can keep green fees low.
An 18-hole round on a weekday at Humber Valley costs $42 – or $27 for seniors who make up the vast majority of players during the week.
However, one of the city’s five clubs, Dentonia Golf Course at Danforth and Victoria Park Avenues, did lose money last year, finishing $36,308 in the red. While management of city pro shops is contracted out, groundskeeping is still done by unionized parks staff.
In some cases, the courses were originally built with an eye to preserving green space or as a buffer zone for flooding. Humber Valley has its origins in the devastation of hurricane Hazel in 1954, which saw the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority take control of floodplain lands alongside the Humber, allowing them to be used only as a park or a golf course. The Don Valley and Scarlett Woods courses also sit on floodplains, making development largely impossible.
After storms three years ago, parts of the Humber Valley course were flooded, and benches and portable toilets were swept away by water that left dead fish behind on the fairways.
Still, a city review is under way of all real estate assets and how they could be better used, as recommended by the mayor’s blue-ribbon panel on the city’s finances earlier this year. In Etobicoke, where Mr. Holyday was mayor before amalgamation, Royal Woodbine operates a course on city land and pays the city rent in a long-term lease. Centennial Park Golf Centre operates on a similar arrangement.
Regardless of how they are run, the number of golfers at the city’s courses has declined, with 189,000 rounds played last year, compared with more than 250,000 a decade ago, a situation Ms. Fletcher attributed to the growing number of suburban courses from which to choose.
It is also partly due, parks officials say, to demographic changes, as more immigrants from countries where golf is uncommon move into the city. However, in an effort to bring new players to the game, unlimited play for junior golfers is offered at certain times for $300 a season, and clinics with pros at Humber Valley are aimed at young people in the increasingly diverse neighbourhoods that surround the course.
Ms. Fletcher, who played Humber Valley with fellow councillors Gloria Lindsay Luby of Etobicoke and Ron Moeser of Scarborough yesterday, said golf’s health benefits, especially for seniors, are obvious. But she said the game has its benefits for politicians, too, as it requires precision, accuracy and patience: “Especially for politicians, I would add, that patience part is very important.”
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Glendale Golfs Transcona Manitoba
Winnipeg Tropical Paradise Theme Hotels Room
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