UPDATED, May 24, 2021: Updated to clarify the relationship between Chief Industries Inc. and C&L Land LLC.
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When Iron Eagle Golf Course next opens, it’ll be under a different master.
With a pair of 7-1 votes Tuesday night, North Platte City Council members approved a lease-purchase agreement turning over the 18-hole course to a business unit partly owned by Grand Island-based Chief Industries.
They also signaled an end to a three-decade public golf experiment that bitterly divided the community and barely avoided foundering amid chronic red ink and four South Platte River floods in Iron Eagle’s first two decades.
C&L Land LLC, which will pay a nonrefundable $5,000 fee applicable to the purchase price, also assumes existing city leases of Iron Eagle’s golf equipment and driving range.
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Councilman Mark Woods cast the lone “no” votes against adopting an ordinance approving Iron Eagle’s lease-purchase agreement and authorizing Mayor Brandon Kelliher to close the deal.
The council earlier voted 6-2 to waive the rule requiring three “yes” votes to adopt an ordinance, with Woods’ fellow Ward 4 Councilman Ed Rieker joining him.
Roger Bullington, president and general manager of Chief Development Inc., said the company hopes — despite Iron Eagle’s troubled history — to make the course a viable component of a neighboring “senior living” development his firm proposed in 2019.
“We’re going to try to get the operators lined up and the liquor license” in the hope of opening by the start of summer, Bullington said after the council meeting. “Those are the two big things to do immediately.”
He said Chief’s proposed 55-and-older housing development and separate commercial projects along Halligan Drive were slowed by COVID-19 but still in progress. The firm’s Iron Trail Industrial Park warehousing and manufacturing project is well under way.
Chief’s overall $30 million to $40 million development plan didn’t call for absorbing Iron Eagle at its August 2019 unveiling.
Bullington said then that Iron Eagle would be an attractive neighbor to Chief’s 200-plus-unit senior-living development — but its absence wouldn’t be a deal-breaker.
Council division over Iron Eagle, already heated when Chief disclosed its plan, boiled over at a September 2019 meeting that prompted a frustrated Mayor Dwight Livingston to disclose he had been engaged in talks to divest the course.
In a final interview with The Telegraph on Dec. 1 — his last full day as mayor — Livingston confirmed he had been talking with Chief at that time about taking on Iron Eagle.
Bullington “has been good for our community,” the outgoing mayor said. “He’s going to be good for our community.”
After Tuesday’s meeting, Bullington thanked Livingston and retired City Adminstrator Jim Hawks as “the ones who got this started,” along with the council, Kelliher and Hawks’ successor Matthew Kibbon for bringing the deal to completion.
“We have faith in North Platte that there’s going to be a spurt in growth in the opportunities there,” Bullington said.
“That’s what drew us to the town a couple years ago. We haven’t changed (in) that.”
City voters wrote the preface to the Iron Eagle saga in May 1990, when they rejected a plan to buy nine-hole Indian Meadows Golf Course and add nine more holes on city-owned land across South Buffalo Bill Avenue.
They accepted a plan in May 1992 to build an 18-hole course on land donated by the Glenn Chase family along the South Platte. The family gave the city a “quit-claim” deed in April 2020 to ease a possible sale.
During and after the 1992 campaign, supporters said they expected the course, built during an upswing in golf’s popularity nationwide, would pay for itself.
It never did. In June 1995, almost exactly a year after Iron Eagle opened, the South Platte’s first major flood in decades inundated several low-lying holes.
Other floods damaged the course in June 1997, September 2013 and May 2015, arresting momentum each time as city leaders swung back and forth between direct and hired management and regularly covered thousands of dollars in annual losses.
The council finally agreed last September — a year after Livingston said he hadn’t been idle in seeking a buyer — to seek “requests for proposal” to buy or lease Iron Eagle.
C&L Land submitted the lone response a month later, proposing a lease-purchase deal similar to the one approved Tuesday. The final accord doesn’t commit Chief to maintaining Iron Eagle as is over the long run.
Tuesday’s council debate featured one final burst of public dissension, with Charles McCarty, 1001 East B St., blasting the council for accepting so little money for so much land.
“Things change, and I understand that,” he said. “But you can’t convince me to give away 154 acres to anybody for $10,000 and they (also) do not have to keep it as a golf course.”
Council members noted the general lack of would-be buyers, with Councilman Ty Lucas adding that most of Iron Eagle sits on “accretion land” with limited potential for other types of development.
“We’ve got well north of $10 million invested in this development as a community,” Lucas said. “I think a lease is as good as the party you’re leasing to, and I think we have the right party who can give our community back some value by having an enhanced development.”
Because Chief previously ran its own golf course in Grand Island, “there’s a good chance we can have a viable golf entity out there still,” added Councilman Jim Carman.
Though all eight council members said it was time for the city to let Iron Eagle go, Woods and Rieker opposed waiving the usual three votes on an ordinance so that residents could speak their minds at least once more.
Other members and Bullington said the clock already was ticking to hold at least a partial 2021 season. It can take six to eight weeks to ready equipment and line up staff, added former Councilman Jim Backenstose.
“We cannot push this back any farther. We need to move forward,” said Backenstose, who lives next to Iron Eagle. “We’ve been negotiating for five months. I don’t think having another reading’s going to make any difference.”
He added that North Platte High School’s boys golf team still hopes to use Iron Eagle as its home course this spring. Bullington said he hadn’t thought about that and will check to see if that can be done.
Though he has opposed Iron Eagle since its beginning, Woods said, he also believes the lease-purchase agreement locks in generous terms for C&L Land.
“We’re partners, but you kind of have to feel like a red-headed stepchild,” he said of the low purchase price and nominal rent. “I know incentives are necessary, but how much do we have to give? It just feels a little unfair.”
Bullington said later that Iron Eagle’s previous hired managers “did a good job,” only to be foiled by the constant setbacks from South Platte floods.
“It’s going to be tough to make it work,” he said. “We’re not delusional.”
Before voting “yes” for the deal itself, Rieker reflected on the long years of community division over Iron Eagle.
“I think this will go a long way to bring our community back together as one community,” he said. “This golf course has divided us about as long as people have been playing golf out there. And I’m glad this sore’s going to be healed.”
Kelliher, who returned to North Platte from college six months before Iron Eagle opened, seconded Rieker’s feelings.
“It’s important for the community to remember that the success of the (Chief) developments mean we’ll have a successful golf course going into the future,” he said.
“I’m very enthusiastic about the fact that North Platte can move beyond the issue of Iron Eagle Golf Course.”
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