Closed Rancho Mirage Country Club golf course may get a second life
Larry Bohannan
Of the more than 1,000 golf courses that have closed across the country in the last decade, victims of declining participation in the game or developers gobbling up the land and plowing courses under to build homes, hotels and business parks, only a handful have managed to get a second life.
The homeowners at Rancho Mirage Country Club are hoping their former course, closed for more than two years, can be one of the rare courses to rise from the ashes.
By a vote of 240-15, the members of the HOA at Rancho Mirage Country Club have approved a settlement agreement with Oasis Ranch LLC, which bought and closed the golf course in June of 2015. The agreement will allow Oasis Ranch to pursue development of a boutique hotel on the property while deeding about 80 acres of property back to the homeowners association with plans for some kind of new golf course in about two years.
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“Our position in the negotiation with them was we might be willing to allow some limited development in exchange for as much open space as we could possibly retain, and hopefully retain that open space in the form of a golf course,” said Steve Downs, president of the HOA and lead negotiator in the discussions that have stretched out for more than a year.
With the vote, a lawsuit by the HOA against Oasis Ranch has been dismissed. Under the agreement, Oasis Ranch will retain about 25 acres of the property, including the old clubhouse and tennis courts. Plans are already underway for development of a hotel, spa, swimming pool and some residences inside the Rancho Mirage Country Club gates. The rest of the land, about 80 acres, will be transferred to the HOA at no cost.
“Once they get approval of the various entitlement applications, once they get that, Oasis Ranch is obligated to transfer the rest of the land to us at no cost,” said Downs, a full-time resident of the property since 2002. “They are obligated to, the ultimate developer is obligated to build a golf course. They must do it in the first phase of development. The first phase of development must include the hotel, they are going to build a very nice spa, so it much include the hotel, the spa and the golf course.”
The cost for building and maintaining the golf course will belong to the developer of the hotel, whether that be Oasis Ranch or another developer, the agreement stipulates.
Ronald Richards, a Beverly Hills attorney and the register agent for Oasis Ranch, said in an e-mail response the he was “very satisfied with the outcome of the settlement talks.
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The settlement agreement, approved in a Nov. 10 vote that saw 255 of the 266 Rancho Mirage Country Club owners vote, seems to bring an end to at least one part of the story of the golf course. The HOA did not own the golf course land of the club, so when it went up for sale in 2015, the Beverly Hills-based Oasis Rancho LLC bought the land. Oasis Ranch announced that summer plans for some kind of residential development on the land, with the course closing and not being watered.
That began a battle that saw homeowners struggling to unite, a chain-link fence built behind homes to stop access to the old golf course land before the fence was torn down, cries that homeowner property values were plunging and eventually a lawsuit by the HOA.
Settlement talks began in 2016, and the HOA vote earlier this month ratified that agreement. Downs said the key to shifting from a divided HOA to the overwhelming approval vote was communication, including meetings with small groups of homeowners and letters about twice a month to homeowners with updates on the lawsuit and negotiations.
“I point to Steve. He surmounted it,” said Les Nelson, a three-year Rancho Mirage resident and a member of the HOA board. "There were divisions and it started out with hard feelings toward Ron Richards and it was kind of organized chaos going in different directions, and then Steve pulled it together. He was consistent, he was available, he was honest. He’d tell you the good, tell you the bad, but at least you could believe it and things just persevered.”
“Now that we, my wife and I, realize that we are seeing the light at the end of the tunnel sort to speak, when it comes to things that (Downs) has been involved in leading the group, I’m satisfied,” said Henry Alfaro, a retired Los Angeles television news reporter and an 11-year resident of Rancho Mirage. “But when (Oasis Ranch) put up that damn fence, I was pretty hot.”
The land, which dried up in 2015 after the new owners stopped watering, is now relatively green with the HOA and Oasis Ranch splitting the $50,000 monthly maintenance costs in recent months.
Downs said an aggressive schedule for Oasis Ranch to receive the needed entitlements from the city would be sometime in the summer of 2018. Construction could have a golf course open on the property early in 2020.
“Our team of experienced professionals are working expeditiously in close cooperation with the HOA and the City on the entitlements,” Richards said in his e-mail.
Just what kind of golf course will be built is a question. With just 80 acres to work with between the homes, a regulation golf course seems out of the question
“It will be an 18-hole course, but it will be a short course,” Downs said. “It always was a short course to begin with. At a minimum it will be a par-3 course. At a maximum, there might be a couple of par-4s. We’ll see.”
The course will be open to homeowners and guests at the hotel, but also likely to the public.
“The thing that was clear to us unfortunately is this is a small golf course and it is a small community. The golf economy is what it is over the last 10 years or so,” Downs said. “So the ability of a golf course like this to succeed as an independent business model in the future is pretty limited. It was pretty clear to some of us that we probably had to engage in some alternate use of the land, at least some portion of the land. And a small boutique hotel made a lot of sense, at least as we talked about it and talked to Oasis Ranch.”