City councilors are getting tired of subsidizing Santa Fe's municipal golf and sports complex by more than $1 million a year.
Councilors on the city Finance Committee complained Monday about the situation as they voted to renew a $75,000-a-year contract to promote the 7-year-old Municipal Recreation Complex golf courses southwest of the city.
Councilors also directed city staff to ask experts for advice on how to sell golfing in an increasingly competitive market.
"This thing is hemorrhaging money year after year," Councilor Karen Heldmeyer said. "Is there something we can do that's more major surgery than just doing marketing?"
The complex opened in 1998 on 1,260 acres acquired from the U.S. Bureau of Land Management on Caja del Río Road, off N.M. 599.
The $14 million complex includes the Marty Sanchez Links de Santa Fe's 9-hole and 18-hole courses and a driving range, plus seven soccer fields, five baseball fields and other facilities, all irrigated with municipal sewage effluent.
According to complex manager Larry Lujan, the golf course brings in nine times as much revenue as the sports fields, but not enough to help pay off the debt the city incurred when it developed the project.
In the last fiscal year, the entire complex brought in enough revenue to pay for all operating expenses with about $430,000 left over. But the $1.5 million in annual debt service for a municipal bond issue to finance the project, which runs for an additional 20 years, caused the city to continue to lose more than $1 million a year. The losses are made up from city gross-receipts taxes earmarked for capital-improvement projects, such as streets, bridges and other construction projects.
Lujan's figures also show the number of golf rounds played at the Marty Sanchez courses have decreased in recent years -- 45,912 in fiscal 2003-04 and 46,348 in 2002-03, compared with 49,723 in 2001-02.
Clarissa Lovato of Elevate Media & Marketing, which the city pays to promote the golf courses, said the decline is due to new courses that have opened at Pojoaque and Santa Clara pueblos, both of which are investing casino revenues into commercial recreation ventures. Currently, she said, there are seven golf courses within a 30-mile radius.
Lovato said she is concentrating on getting more locals, especially young ones, to the Marty Sanchez course by offering them discounted rates.
But councilors at Monday's committee hearing were unimpressed.
Councilor David Pfeffer said that even though the number of rounds played by locals are increasing, so many out-of-town golfers are going elsewhere that the overall use is likely to continue falling.
Councilor Rebecca Wurzburger said the original assumptions of city officials who pushed for the development in the late 1990s were erroneous.
Councilor Carol Robertson Lopez moved to extend the marketing contract. But the councilor said she recently talked to former Gov. Garrey Carruthers, now dean of business and economics at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, about the school's undergraduate program in golf-course management.
She moved to have city staff contact NMSU's program to see if it might offer some suggestions about how Santa Fe could run its golf course more efficiently. Lopez said that might mean taking the management of the golf course away from the private firm that runs it and letting city staff take over the operation.
Councilors on the committee unanimously endorsed Lopez's suggestion.
Source: The Santa Fe New Mexican (New Mexico)