Tonight’s very special episode of the Golf Commission

Tonight, the Golf Commission is having a very special meeting to hear the proposals from Greenway Golf and KemperSports to lease out the Chuck Corica Golf Complex.  Unfortunately this will not be televised because it will be held offsite at Washington Park, but if you are interested in affecting the outcome of who eventually gets the contract, this is the perfect time because at the end of the meeting the Golf Commission will take a vote to recommend one of the two to the City Council.

As a reminder, here are the two proposals and I wrote a little something about it all here.  I have to say that after watching the video, I actually did like the Greenway Golf proposal better, even though I had been leaning in that direction in the first place.   I don’t golf, I’ve probably mentioned that before, so I’m not really biased on way or the other based on any personal relationships or experiences with KemperSports employees.  However, given the many times that they have, let’s just say, tripped up in the past, I would not be inclined to be supportive of their bid.

Reporting on the CAFR: you’re doing it wrong

On Tuesday night, after the whole business about the Golf Complex was completed.  The decision was that the City Council would give City Staff time to review the proposal by Ron Cowan before making any definitive decisions.    KemperSports seemed sufficiently chastened by prospects that any number of alternate operators might be able to fill in for them and came in a lot more flexible than before.   Acting City Manager Lisa Goldman confirmed that our former Interim City Manager had made promises to KemperSports that the City would issue tax-exempt bonds to finance KemperSports’ capital improvements to the site (in the neighborhood of $5 million) and that KemperSports would pay the debt service on the bonds, which Lisa Goldman put the kibosh on because it wouldn’t be kosher.

The City Council asked to have City Staff work on a pinning down a few more items in the Alameda Junior Golf Association term sheet and then to bring back a lease to the Council.   I’ll talk more about the Cowan plan when I get a chance to review it, but another equally interesting conversation occurred after most people vacated the room last night that John P. hinted at in yesterday’s comments.

Don’t turn around, look look

Tonight the City Council will be getting reviews of all these financial documents tonight which will be deadly boring, but I’m sure someone will find them newsworthy.

One of the documents is a ten year history of lease revenues for the ARRA (Alameda Point).   An interesting number is the spike in FY 07-08 in the Fund Balance of almost $1.8 million.  Because it appears that expenditures had gone up, the collected lease revenues looked pretty flat, so in looking for where the extra money came from, it looked like a category called “Charges for current services” gave a substantial bump to that year.  To compare, the “Charges for current services” has only been collected three out of the ten years tracked here, in FY 06-07 only $44K was collected and in FY 08-08 only $107K was collected.

The bulk of that money which made up the largest portion of the fund balance was from, wait for it…wait for it…