City Manager Jim Crosby said the Chickasha Golf and Country Club is for sale and he asked the City Council, “Is the city interested in buying it? If the price is right, it would be a good purchase,” he said.
“I’d like to see the city buy the land but not the 18hole golf course,” he added during a council work session April 28. The 70.4 acres “would be perfect for a park in the future.”
It was noted that several golf courses operate within short driving distances of Chickasha.
“It’s very expensive to run a golf course,” Councilman John Smith said. If the City of Chickasha bought the country club property, “We could not afford to operate it as a public golf course.”
Newly elected Councilman Clark Southard told his colleagues that a handful of golf courses in southwest Oklahoma “have closed in the last 10 years.” Those include courses in Anadarko, Hinton, Yukon, Waurika, plus River Bend in Chickasha.
“And if you look at the ‘big picture’ in the state, there are many more that have been closed,” he later told Southwest Ledger.
In the Tulsa area, closures have included White Hawk (Bixby), Scissortail (Catoosa), The Woods (Coweta), Emerald Falls and Glen Eagles (Broken Arrow), Cotton Creek (Glenpool), Clary Fields (Sapulpa), and the Okmulgee Country Club.
Around Oklahoma City, SilverHorn, Brookside, and Coffee Creek in Edmond have shut down. Others have included Shadow Creek (Sallisaw) and Eagle Crest (Muskogee).
Publicly owned golf course “are money losers,” Southard said, at least in part because of the water usage required to irrigate them. “They are economic development killers because they don’t make money.”
Southard is a retired Army officer who has been self-employed as an economic development consultant for several years.
Turning to capital improvements, Crosby said leaks in the Country Club water tower have been sealed “but we will have to drain the tank, clean the inside and then paint it.” That job will have to wait until later in the year; it probably will be let out for bids “sometime in the fall,” he said. “We can’t do that in the summer,” when water consumption is at its highest level.
Crosby also said the city plans to widen Grand Avenue between First and Fourth streets. “That will be a major project,” he said, because the city will need to take some land from a hotel, move a drainage structure, and relocate Public Service Co. of Oklahoma utility lines.
Also planned is an asphalt overlay on 17th Street between Grand and Iowa avenues, Crosby said.
The city manager also reported on two other matters of significance. “We hope to have a big announcement June 5th at the Chic kasha Municipal Airport” northwest of town, and he said a lawsuit “that’s been hanging since 2020” is ne aring a settlement.