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SALT LAKE CITY — The city is stopping short of calling this a fight, but perhaps a golf analogy is useful: The federal government has stepped up and taken a big swing, recently yelled fore, and now the city has had to quickly move out of the way of what could have been a looming closure of the golf course in June or July.
The city has gotten the feds to back up a bit, but this is serious enough that Mayor Ralph Becker is in Washington D.C. trying to resolve the issue.
It can be summed up in three words: fair market value. Is the airport getting what the land under the golf course is worth? Of course, it gets a little more complicated from there.
Salt Lake City leases the land from the airport in order to have the golf course here. The airport owns the land. But because the airport gets federal grant money from the FAA, it has to comply with what is essentially a rule that requires the airport to be as profitable as possible.
So the question becomes: Should the city's golf fund be shelling out fair market value money to operate here? Right now, the golf fund isn't paying anything, according to the city.
"They're saying, ‘Well, we don't think the lack of money the golf fund is paying to the airport is appropriate and maybe there's a better use for that land that would generate more money for the airport,'" said David Everett, Mayor Becker's chief of staff. "We don't necessarily agree with that but we're just going through a process right now to figure out what that would look like."
The Everett didn't have a good answer to how much money we're talking. He said there are a lot of factors that play in and that's part of the process too - figuring out how much money is involved. He did say the golf course isn't exactly a sinkhole for money.
Some years it's a small net gain. Other years it's a small net loss under the current arrangement. It's also unclear what else the airport could put out here to make money. Long-time workers here say the idea of closing the golf course isn't necessarily a surprise - it's the timeline.
The city is certainly not characterizing this as sudden death, but more like a match play event. It's likely to go on for several more months. In the meantime, the city is saying absolutely they want this golf course staying put.
