Some locals are indeed irritated. A few dozen joined Carlucci at a rally outside the club last month, chanting, “Pay Your Taxes!” The Trump Organization declined to comment.
What kind of difference might the legislation make? First off, proponents have stressed, local tax authorities wouldn’t have to do a thing if it became law; they’d just be given the option of adopting the best-use methodology. “If municipalities are concerned about assessing them this way -- that this would hurt golf clubs and force them out of business -- then they don’t have to do it,” Carlucci said.
If they did, though, the results could be dramatic. Take the Westchester Country Club, a former PGA Tour stop with a full market value of $37 million, according to the town of Harrison’s 2018 assessment roll. Current real estate listings put residential land in Harrison at $250,000 to $900,000 an acre. So the club’s value -- in a very back-of-the-envelope estimate -- could possibly increase to as much as $280 million.
Those kinds of numbers tell the backstory. “Communities feel like they’re getting a raw deal,” said Larry Hirsh, president of Golf Property Analysts.
In New York, courts have backed private-club assessments based on comparable public courses, ignoring whatever private members pay in dues and initiation fees. And the industry has many arguments for maintaining the status quo, including one about fairness.
Under the bill, “only golf courses would be singled out and subjected to the ‘highest and best’ use standard, which is now applied only to undeveloped land,” Thomas Nevin, Westchester Country Club’s chief operating officer, said in an email.
James Gaughran, a Long Island Democrat who chairs the Senate committee where the bill has been languishing, ticked off a litany of other defenses for the current-use method, including that courses drive tourism, help recharge aquifers, provide open space and are important venues for charity fundraising.
The impact probably would be greatest upstate, where fairways are abundant and golfers are not. Trey Walewski said his nine-hole Meadowbrook Golf Club in Weedsport is already struggling. The bill becoming law would be the capper. “The day it passes is the day I walk to the bank and hand them the keys.”
Charles Dorn, president of the New York State Club Association, said that by his calculation, courses might have to pay from four to 10 times more than they do today. He said that could spell the end for one in three of the state’s 250 private clubs and the jobs they provide.
The golf business has been under pressure for a while. There were were 16,693 courses in the U.S. at the end of 2018, down 8% from 2006, according to the National Golf Foundation. Americans played 434 million rounds in 2018, 4.8% fewer than a year earlier.