The town has tried several avenues for making money from this 18-hole course, but has been repeatedly frustrated.
SOUTH HADLEY – Voters in South Hadley defeated a proposal Tuesday to pay $44,424 to Meadowbrook Golf management group of Florida for its truncated effort to manage the town-owned golf course, The Ledges, this spring.
That agreement was ended when it was discovered that hiring the company without putting the job out for bids first was illegal.
The town will have to go back into negotiations with Meadowbrook to come up with an amount of money that both sides will accept.
The golf course is a sore point because it has been losing money for years. At a special Town Meeting Tuesday, Selectboard chairman Robert Judge deflected criticism of the Town Manager by saying that he, as a member of the Selectboard, accepts personal responsibility for authorizing Paul Beecher to send a letter asking Meadowbrook for an arrangement.
“We’re his boss and he reports to us,” said Judge.
The Meadowbrook situation is a tangled one because of the conditions that came with the grants and loans that made it possible.
The town has tried several avenues for making money from this beautiful 18-hole course, but has been repeatedly frustrated.
“In April we knew what we had been doing was not working well,” said Judge after the meeting, “and we talked about trying to take a different approach.” The Selectboard decided to contact a professional golf management company. Meadowbrook is the parent company of the groundskeepers at The Ledges.
“A letter was signed that shouldn’t have been signed,” said Judge. “We did it hastily, we had to get the course open (for the season), and it was a mistake.”
Judge said the Selectboard has voted to consider three options for The Ledges: First, have the town manage the course. Second, close the course, though it means continuing to pay off the debt. Third, have a private company – that is, a professional management company like Meadowbrook – manage the course.
The special Town Meeting did approve payment of an extra $10,000 for liability insurance for the town, since the price has gone up. It’s now $210,000 a year.
It also authorized spending $100,000 for a temporary roof on the old FiberMark building at Main and Canal Streets, which became the town’s property when the old Northeast Utilities site was purchased.
Town Meeting also approved another $25,000 for FiberMark, mostly for minimal heating and air conditioning to keep the building from deteriorating further.
“We don’t want to put any more into the building than we absolutely have to,” said Judge, “until we have an idea of how it’s going to be used.”
Town Meeting defeated an article proposing that Siemens Industry, which is doing an investment-grade audit of South Hadley’s municipal buildings, take charge of replacing the broken boilers at Town Hall.
Siemens would have approached the problem in a holistic way that included weatherizing the entire building.
Town Meeting opted for a more traditional approach.