ASHEVILLE, N.C. — Keith Pope remembers standing on the 13th green of the Municipal Golf Course 10 years ago, grass underfoot giving way to dirt, and wondering if the course was a challenge worth taking on.
“The course is in really bad condition,” Pope, CEO of the Sarasota, Florida-based company Pope Golf, remembered saying. “What can we do?”
Now, a decade later, Pope Golf’s lease is up. Since October 2012, the company has been responsible for daily operations and maintenance of the historic Asheville golf course. Its lease with the city expires Sept. 30, when the course will inherit new operators and a new model of management.
But Pope is leaving the course in the midst of a dispute over $324,934 in outstanding lease payments to the city.
The 18-hole golf course was designed by Hall of Fame golf architect Donald Ross and opened for play in 1927. It is home to the longest-running professional tournament in the country owned and operated by Black golfers.
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The course itself has seen “steadily degrading conditions” over the last 10 years, according to the city, and at its center are significant stormwater drainage issues, which Pope said is the reason behind not only the course conditions but his termination of lease payments.
“We really had much higher hopes of what we could do with the golf course when we took over than what eventually happened,” Pope said. “We fought this stormwater drainage problem almost the entire time we had the lease.”
Pope argues that repair of stormwater improvements − failing infrastructure that carries a price tag of more than $2 million, according to a 2020 report by civil engineering firm McAdams − falls to the city.
“They’ve been promising me for seven years they were going to fix the drainage, and they never did,” Pope said of his decision not to pursue contract renewal. “So I couldn’t take the financial risk.”
Chris Corl, the city’s director of Community and Regional Entertainment Facilities, whose department oversees the course, said stormwater responsibilities fall to the lessee, in this case, Pope Golf, as part of general upkeep and maintenance.
This discrepancy rests at the crux of the dispute over back payments, with the city threatening…
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