It's tough to find new money on an established course, but there could be streams - both literal and financial - that haven't been considered. Environmental "banks" which serve as a clearing house for credits earned from the creation, preservation or conservation of wetlands, nutriets, animal or plant habitat or carbon can provide new golf course revenue streams in the form of either cash on the barrelhead or tax credits.
With the right kind of wetlands or other habitat, the return on time spent qualifying for and receiving approval for the credit is substantial, despite costs for consultants or monitoring. Where regulatory agencies used to just play aggressively to push courses to plan environmentally, more and more incentives are available for compliance.
"Approximately 50 percent of our work now is in wetland or stream mitigation banking," said Williamsburg Environmental's Ron Boyd, - a marked departure from the late 1990s and early2000s when much of their golf work involved new course development consultation. "We get e-mails almost every day on courses that are filing for bankruptcy. Many of those have wetlands or stream areas that could be [placed for sale in] mitigation banks. In some cases, if a course is on the verge of foreclosure, we can do a plan and pro forma [for mitigation banking] to take to the bank. Sometimes if a bank sees the potential for new revenue, a course can avoid foreclosure."
Boyd said the ideal scenarios for substantial revenue from wetlands credits are 36-hole or 27-hole facilities in outlying areas with some acreage surrounding the course. If such a facility is struggling, nine of 27 or 18 of 36 can be closed and, assuming soil conditions are right and there is either a free-flowing stream or existing wetlands on the property, those can be turned into wetlands mitigation bank credits and sold.
There are other types of credits as well: nutrient and habitat credits are available, and carbon credits are a new and growing bank source for courses with existing resources.
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