New golf course administrator reaches out to community

New general manager Charlie Kong and Grant Becklund are working on improvements at the North Golf Course. Menifee 24/7 photo: Doug Spoon

By Doug Spoon, Editor

In his first two months as the new general manager of the Cherry Hills Golf Course, Charlie Kong’s focus has been mending fences – both literally and figuratively.

Kong has supervised noticeable improvements in the greens on the Cherry Hills Course as well as in the overall appearance of the closed North Course, which is owned by the same Korean-based Golf and Art LLC. He explains that damage control in this case involves much more than watering fairways and replacing dead trees.

His primary task has been getting out and talking to the people. A manager in the golf industry for nearly 30 years, he realizes that successful management of a golf course involves a lot more than landscaping.

As Kong puts it, you have to satisfy the golfers. Otherwise, your course will be vacant.

“I feel that community outreach has been missing here for the last 10 years,” said Kong. “I’ve been having meetings with community leaders almost every week.

“We are continuing to solicit ideas from community leaders, city officials and homeowners. We’re trying to get information from people about what they want to happen here. We want to try to compromise and come out with a win-win plan.”

This response is more than anything offered by management from the company in the nearly two years since it closed the North Course – a fixture in the Sun City community since the 1960s. Citing financial concerns, ownership closed the North Course with the hope that golfers would continue to support the bigger, adjacent Cherry Hills Course.

The result was public backlash, not only from residents living around the closed North Course as it began to deteriorate, but from golfers who began to stay away from the Cherry Hills Course. One thing Kong said he has learned in two months – people are angry about the situation. But thanks to the efforts of Kong in physical improvement of the course and community relations, crowds at the Cherry Hills Course have greatly improved recently.

“They didn’t come out before,” Kong said. “Now they are. They tried to boycott this golf course. They’re disappointed in the way the ownership handled the property. Now they come out and say, ‘Tell me what’s your plan.’ I say, ‘We want to listen to you.' Little by little, we became friends.

“The reason we have more golfers here now is they opened their minds, they opened their doors to us.”

That still doesn’t answer the question of what re-development Kong’s company plans for the North Course. Will any part of it be kept as a golf course? Will ownership request re-zoning to build homes on part of the property?

Those options are still being considered, but there are signs of progress. At the request of Kong, he and company consultant Grant Becklund met with Mayor Bill Zimmerman, City Council member Greg August and City Manager Armando Villa in mid-November. Plans for improvement on the North Course were submitted and Villa suspended further code enforcement action against the ownership for 30 days while Kong and Becklund continued to consider options for re-development.

“At first we were reluctant to meet with them because we have an ongoing code enforcement case,” said Villa, referring to multiple citations for dead trees and grass, trash and intruders on the closed course. “He (Kong) said they are now better funded to deal with some of the problems.

“I told them they need a high degree of outreach, that changes would require a consensus of the community. The rules in this situation are very unique. The city has zoning power, but the homeowners have civil power through CC&Rs that are self-enforced by the HOA. Any proposed change to the land use would require a change in CC&Rs by the consensus of the community.”

Details regarding this are vague. Becklund said this is in part because documents written at the time of developer Del Webb’s 1960s creation of the Sun City community about land use and the golf courses are difficult to research.

“What makes it so tough is what documentation is left from the 60s, when all this was approved,” said Becklund about documents transferred from the County to the City of Menifee upon incorporation 10 years ago.

“I’ve worked on a couple other projects in the city. The quality of the material the county delivered from their files is pretty poor. A lot of it is material that was put on microfiche, and the quality doesn’t always leave something readable. I have to research that.”

Kong said one option was to renovate part of the North Course as a golf school, with nine short holes. That plan would also include a senior care center on the property, if re-zoned.

“That’s one of the options,” Kong said. “We’re in the process of listening to people. We’re open to anybody’s ideas.”

Kong and Becklund said they plan to hold community forums and invite residents’ input. So far, communication has been on an individual or small group basis. Kong said that has been mostly positive as residents have begun to see improvements on the course.

“They come out and talk to us,” Kong said. “We water every morning and patrol the area four or five times as day. We secure the property from intruders, pick up trash and maintain the area. They come out and say hello. We took pictures together so many times. Most of them are happy and they have started to come back and play golf here.”

Yet as Kong admits, improving relations with residents has been a process.

“One man was right in my face when I first came here,” Kong said. “And that person, he’s an important person in the Civic Association. Now he’s invited me to dinner, to his house. He says, ‘Come to my party.’ Not only him, but several people have invited me to their meetings, dinners, lunches.

“There’s been a drought in the relationship between the homeowners and my ownership. I’m improving the relationship with homeowners every day.”