Show and Tell

By Dan Gleason

A maintenance Open House proved to be the perfect way for Leonard Theis to get his budget approved by a cost-conscious board

Leonard Theis didn’t need to bring the mountain to Mohammed; in a manner of speaking, the golf course superintendent got Mohammed to come to the mountain. “Mohammed,” in this case, was actually a group of people—the members of the Sun City Roseville retirement community near Sacramento, California—and the “mountain” was Theis’ maintenance facility and the equipment that kept Sun City Roseville’s 27-hole golf course alive and well.

“The main problem was that the residents didn’t have a working knowledge of what it takes to keep a golf course alive,” recalls Theis, who by 2001 was facing increasing resistance from the community’s board of directors to his annual maintenance budget requests. “Or how vital the course was to their home values.”

As a bit of background, many of Sun City Roseville’s 5,000 residents were (and still are) upper-middle-class citizens on fixed incomes, and only about one in four played golf.  When real estate prices spiked, the average home around Sacramento jumped from approximately $230,000 to $350,000 within two years, prompting many people to cash in and move to Sun City to retire. These sellers planned to use their profits to sustain them for the rest of their lives, so they had to scrutinize where every dollar went.

Little wonder that when Theis asked for $50,000 to buy a verti-drainer and custom mowers—equipment most of the Sun City residents had never heard of, much less seen—some panicked. “There were some residents who wanted to just plow the course under and make a park out of it,” says Theis, noting that by then, the residents had acquired the property from the developer, Del Webb Corporation, and were keeping a close eye on every dime.

Even so, Theis believed he could win the residents and board over if they realized that the golf course was keeping their home values considerably higher than comparable residences in the area that didn’t have golf courses. “I just needed to get them all together to make my pitch,” he notes.

That’s when Theis came up with the idea of hosting an open house at the club’s maintenance facility. He picked a date right after spring aerification, when the grounds staff had a slow period, and publicized the event for weeks via word of mouth, posters and flyers. Meanwhile, the staff did its annual spring cleaning, then washed and tagged each piece of equipment with 3-by-5-inch cards that explained the function of each machine. “We wanted everyone to know exactly what we were spending every dollar of their money on and why it was essential to the community,” Theis says.

On the day of the event, crew members were stationed next to their principle piece of equipment to meet guests and answer any questions. The spray technician offered tours of the chemical storage area, and the maintenance computer was running so residents could see how computerized irrigation worked to save time and money. All the while, a GCSAA course maintenance movie played over and over, and people were encouraged to watch it. Theis also offered food and refreshments.

“The fare wasn’t elaborate,” he admits. “We bought hot dogs, chips and sodas out of our operating budget. Yes, they were hotdogs, but we bought them from our clubhouse restaurant, so if there are such things as ‘gourmet hot dogs,’ these were it.”

Although the turnout for the first open house wasn’t as big as Theis had hoped (some 30 people showed), the attendance increased significantly in each of the remaining five years he was employed at the course. (Theis left Sun City in late 2005 and is now the superintendent at Indian Creek Golf Course in nearby Loomis.) What’s more, most of those who attended the inaugural event were on the community’s board of directors, so when Theis went to the next annual meeting to get his budget approved, he was met by friendly faces that knew him and his staff personally and were now educated in the basics of golf course maintenance.

“Most importantly, the board members and other residents who attended our subsequent open houses realized that the value of the homes in which they had invested a good deal of their life savings was linked integrally to their golf course,” says Theis, noting that each event cost approximately $500 to host. In his opinion, that was a small price to pay in return for the newfound community cooperation and budget approvals that he enjoyed. “That was the last I ever heard of anyone wanting to plow the course under and make it into a park.”

Dan Gleason is an Arizona-based freelance writer.