Hobart, Wis. - With several parties reportedly interested in buying Hobart's Thornberry Creek golf course, a village committee this week plans to propose extending the village's lease to the course's former owner, with other alternatives to selling the course on the horizon.
Jim Anderson, chairman of the Hobart Golf Course Advisory Committee, said the panel plans to submit a draft lease to the Village Board at its meeting Tuesday.
The committee will then host a public forum on Oct. 6 to examine other possibilities.
"We're looking at different contingency options, including a golf course ownership association where residents would own the course and a golf-course management company running the course for us," Anderson said, noting the options are "not necessarily in any priority sequence, but clearly the lease extension is something that we tackled right away."
Hobart took up an option in late 2002 to buy Thornberry Creek for $7.3 million when its ownership dissolved and then leased the course back to former owner Jack Schweiner.
The sale was one of the controversial decisions cited as reasons for a recall that brought Village President Rich Heidel to the helm a year ago.
Now, with Schweiner's lease running through March, the controversy is whether to sell the course.
"As a resident, we're really concerned with our property values and keeping the present owner of the course," said Thornberry Creek resident Michael Hermes. "That subdivision represents a third of the Hobart tax base."
With that, Hermes said he's led an effort in the past couple months to form an ownership group.
Residents and others who would care to join would make the course semi-private -- operating two days a week for the public and five days a week for members and guests, with membership fees acting as investments in the course.
Hermes and other golf course residents packed the last Village Board meeting Sept. 7, clamoring to keep Schweiner in charge of the golf course, which he developed. They also demanded answers about the officials' motives.
"My goal is to sell the golf course -- my goal is to reclaim up to a third of our debt capacity," Heidel told them. "And yet we've got to do it in some type of agreeable manner."
He said that means imposing restrictions that would require any buyer to pay the equivalent of all property taxes, that the property would remain a golf course and that the village would have an option to buy back the course if any future owner chooses to sell it.
Hermes said there can be little argument that the best owners would be the residents themselves.
"The ideal situation would be for us to own and have a stake in the course and have voting rights as to who the course could be sold to and so forth," he said. "That's the ideal situation for anybody that I've ever talked to."
If you go
Hobart's Village Board meets at 6 p.m. Tuesday at the village office, 2990 S. Pine Tree Road, Hobart.
Hobart's Golf Course Advisory Committee will host a public forum on options for the Thornberry Creek golf course at 7 p.m. Oct. 6 at Hillcrest Elementary, 4193 Hillcrest Road, Hobart.
Source: Green Bay Press-Gazette (Wis.)