EVERETT — Billy Casper has one of the great names in golf history, but there was nothing great about the final few months of Billy Casper Golf’s management relationship with the city of Everett and its two public golf courses, Legion Memorial and Walter E. Hall.
The city wasn’t happy because its contract with Casper Golf was not generating sufficient revenue to keep the courses profitable. Likewise, many golfers weren’t happy because service was slipping at both courses.
In the end, Casper Golf was only too happy to get out of town, asking that its contract with Everett be terminated early, as it was last Sept. 30.
The next day, Premier Golf Inc., took over management of the two courses, and in the early months of this new relationship all parties seem pleased with the change.
In recent years, the city “did hear complaints on a frequent basis” related to customer service and other aspects of Casper Golf’s management, Everett Parks Director Paul Kaftanski said. Those were, he went on, “negative experiences and they can affect your product. But we are very pleased with Premier and its attentiveness to those particular components.”
“A lot of golfers play these golf courses,” said Rex Fullerton, a Premier Golf employee and the new general manager at both Everett courses. “And we’re going to try to make it more enjoyable for them. We want to make them feel like they’re getting a better value for their golf than they were getting before.”
Some of the changes, said Jay Young, men’s club president at Legion Memorial, “are like night and day. … The guys from Premier are doing positive stuff. They’re just motivated, and I knew when I first met them that I’d be excited to work with them.”
Near the end of Casper Golf’s tenure, Young added, it was like the company “was operating on a limited budget. They’d kind of trimmed down their staff support and it was pretty bad. Even the pro would be in on a Saturday morning, working on the grill flipping burgers because there was not enough restaurant staff. And the pro shop as far as merchandise was absolutely pathetic.”
When Fullerton arrived last fall, he remembers the staff being “a little stressed out and maybe the players playing the golf courses being a little agitated. … The golfers were not real pleased with the treatment they’d been getting.”
Fullerton and his team, which included some Casper Golf holdovers, set about trying to turn things around. Since happy customers tend to be repeat customers, the goal was “to operate in a way that was more client-friendly,” he said.
If that task presented challenges, and it did, Fullerton also had some advantages. One, of course, is that Legion Memorial and Walter Hall are extremely popular golf courses, with both doing roughly 60,000 rounds in each of the past few years. A lot of that has to do with being located near large population areas, and also their moderate fees — it costs $28 to play Legion Memorial on weekdays and $32 on weekends, and at Walter Hall those prices are $20 and $24.
In addition, Premier Golf arrived with a reputation for specializing in municipal golf management. The company also manages Seattle’s Jackson Park, Jefferson Park, West Seattle and Interbay golf courses, Bellevue Golf Course, Pierce County’s Lake Spanaway and Fort Steilacoom golf courses, and Maple Valley’s Lake Wilderness Golf Course.
Roy Rumery, a past men’s club president and current board member at Walter Hall, said the golf course operation under Premier Golf “is going a lot better, without question. Even with the mistakes they’ve made, they’ve gone about it the proper way. If an apology was necessary, they did. And it’s been ongoing, so it’s a very definite positive.”
Rumery’s only criticism is a check-in process that is still sometimes poky, causing occasional backups in the pro shop. “That,” he said, “could be better.”
Kaftanski, meanwhile, believes that new management along with a more favorable contract will help the city turn around a string of revenue losses in recent years.
“We’re moving forward,” he said. These days, he added, “it’s nice to come to work and have a dialogue with peers and elected officials, and golf is not a part of that conversation. Because it’s working now.”
Legion Memorial underwent an extensive renovation several years ago, and the city still owes around $8 million on that project, a debt that won’t be paid off for another 20 years, Kaftanski said.
“But we’re on target by 2010 to be making money,” he said. “So it’s been a phenomenal turnaround.”
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