11/02/2023
As I've said all along, I wanted to wait until the City got the property back before commenting fully on the Clubhouse situation.
Yesterday, the papers were filed finalizing the City's taking back of both the pavilion and the property on which the old Muni Clubhouse sat, from Lance Orcutt. The City exercised the Reverter Clauses we included in the deeds to the property, that permitted us to reclaim ownership of these parcels, if Orcutt failed to honor the terms of the purchase agreements.
It is time to turn the page.
I will now go to the Common Council with a new recommendation for the property. As phase one of this new plan, we will PROPOSE that the City distribute a request for qualifications to have a builder/developer design and construct a new outdoor pavilion space, to include an outdoor bar, bathroom facilities, and short order kitchen facilities.
The goal will be to combine the nicest open air dining space and bar in the area, with the million-dollar view of our beautiful golf course. And yes, there will be fire pits included in the design, The existing pro shop will not be demolished. Instead we will require that it be integrated into the overall design of the new venue.
The insurance proceeds from the old clubhouse were used by the City to help reduce our deficit. And because we have completely eliminated our deficit in the interim and replaced it with a surplus, we are in position to bond for this new venue, if necessary. That's the plan, now for a look at how we got here.
During the debate, the Recorder-selected questioners asked three questions about the Golf Course and in each of his responses, my opponent, as he has done consistently throughout this campaign, criticized my actions with several false statements, but gave voters absolutely no clue what his plan would be.
Since we only had 90 seconds for rebuttal at the debate, the candidate who makes accusations against his opponent has the time advantage, because it takes just seconds to make an accusation, but refuting the charge always takes longer.
Which is why, as I listened to the line of questioning presented at the debate and my candidate’s responses, I knew I had to respond with a point-by-point fact check.
What follows is my fifth and final fact check or that debate and this one explains what really happened with the golf course clubhouse.
DEBATE FACT CHECK #5
In the priority scale of challenges this City and it’s Mayor must manage and address, the Municipal Golf Course normally should not even fall among the top ten. Most of our residents do not play golf and the number of residents who purchase an annual membership to Muni is between 100 and 150 individuals. Yet, my opponent has made the Clubhouse issue the centerpiece of his campaign against me. That's because we've effectively delivered on every other promise I made during my campaign!
The deficit is gone. Our attack on blight has been a huge success. We’ve paved record amounts of streets. We’ve made City Hall more efficient and technology driven. We’ve attracted $43 million worth of grants and assistance from our state, federal and county partners. We’ve kept the average annual increase in property taxes at 2.1% despite rising inflation. We’ve made huge strides in the efforts to improve both our drinking water and wastewater infrastructure and despite what my opponent claims, the AFD and APD have received the specific support initiatives they’ve requested to better recruit, fight crime and make our city safer.
And as everyone knows, I've worked long and hard on the Clubhouse issue as well.
The bottom line is that we negotiated what we believed was a good deal for the City with Lance Orcutt, who we were assured was in good standing with our County and City IDAs. His early actions to fulfill the terms of the agreements he had signed, showed great promise. Eventually however, he began avoiding his obligations under those agreements. When we called him on them, he would make promises to correct the missed deadlines and then avoid them as well. His excuses began to outnumber his efforts to comply and when he quietly purchased two other area golf courses, one of which was located just ten miles down the road from Muni, it provided me and the Common Council with firm proof he and his partner Pete Conyne, were different sorts of individuals than we thought they were.
I put that misjudgment squarely on my shoulders. I believed these men would honor the agreements they had signed, and the follow-up promises they made, until their actions convinced me I no longer could.
But to completely understand why I championed the deal we signed with these two men and why the Common Council approved it, one needs to understand how we got to that point in the first place.
To begin, I had no idea the clubhouse situation I inherited would be as mismanaged a mess as it turned out to be. I entered the Mayor's office fully intending to rebuild the existing structure.
Unlike my opponent, I had actually spent hundreds of wonderful moments patronizing that place with cherished friends and family over the years. This is why when the former golf pro opened the door to show me the inside of the place during my first month as Mayor, tears actually came to my eyes. They had literally destroyed the interior of the building and based their motive for doing so on four horribly misguided decisions:
1) That the City should get into the restaurant and bar business.
2) That the golf pro and golf commission and not an independent engineering firm or even the City engineer were permitted to take charge of the effort to fix the clubhouse after the flood occurred.
3) That the City could gut the insides of a flood-damaged building, before “written” authorization was received from the insurance company to do so, and then expect the insurance company to quickly pay for the complete redesign and rebuild of the place, without protest.
4) That a group of “associates” of the former golf pro and one or two former members of the golf commission, could be hired to design and renovate the place on the cheap, despite the fact that the city was obligated to abide by mandated prevailing wage guidelines.
The old guard also assumed revenues from insurance claims would not cost the City anything, when in fact, the huge claim finally received for the Clubhouse is by far the single biggest factor in the $150,000 increase in the city’s property and casualty insurance premium over the last two years!
During my first week as Mayor in January of 2020, the New York State Comptroller’s Office in Albany asked me to pay them a visit. I sat with three gentlemen who knew a lot about the fiscal affairs of our City. They wanted to discuss my plan to get Amsterdam out of it’s fiscal mess and the first thing they brought up was our City’s golf course. The numbers indicated it was over a million dollars in debt, it was a perennial money loser and they wanted to know if I was going to lease it, close it, or sell it. I told them I wanted to study the course’s situation more closely before making any recommendation to the Common Council.
I can guarantee you that if I was Mayor at the time, I would have never approved the recommendation to put our City in the restaurant business. If and when the clubhouse flooding occurred, I would have assigned the effort to repair and reopen the Clubhouse to the City Engineer and not the golf pro or golf commission. And I would never have permitted the City to begin gutting anything without written permission from our insurance carrier.
But even though I was upset by the unprofessional way the situation had been permitted to unfold, I was willing to make the best of the mess I had been handed and try to get it legally across the finish line. But the previous administration had indeed managed to turn what should have been a taxing but doable one mile run into a grueling marathon.
It would take another year and two rounds of bidding to reach a point where we were able to award the rebuild to four subcontractors. The City's Insurance Company had settled the claim for a total of $1,642.848.77. The low bids on each of the four contracts added up to $1,572,800. The final insurance settlement turned out to be roughly $70,000 more than the bids/contracts we approved to start the rebuild. and as soon as we did, it became apparent that the $1.6 million insurance proceeds we finally ended up receiving, still would not be enough to complete the project.
Why? Unexpected costs not included for whatever reason in the bid specs. A clerk of the works was going to cost $10,000 more than we had been told, the specs for the bid had not included a fully equipped kitchen ($30-$50,000). There were no specs in the plans for interior finishes and there was only a relatively small dollar allowance for that item. And then, after the contractors had actually started the renovation more asbestos had been discovered, shutting down the project and costing the City $68,000 more to abate it.
It was at this point that I asked Lance Orcutt if he would be interested in helping the City out. His company Executive Group, designs and builds the interior finishes and furnishings for the restaurants in some of the most luxurious hotels in the New York City and Boston markets. When the golf pro informed me that there was limited money in the budget and no specs in the bid document for interior design specifications, I called Lance and asked him if he could provide that service as a contribution to our City. He happened to be a golfer, he had played Muni several times, loved the course and the course's history and told me he'd be delighted to help.
So we took him to the site and he asked to see the plans and specs. He told me he'd provide the City with two complete schematics for free. One for the original layout and another for the layout he was recommending. He went back up the next day with two of his engineers to do some measurements and inspection. A few days later he called me and told me the plans would be done in two days but he also warned me that the project was poorly designed and seriously underfunded and that we were going to run into one change order after another. I already knew he was right about the underfunding. It was during that conversation that he first broached ideas about getting his company more involved, perhaps as a subcontractor, then the concessionaire and a few days later, he told me he'd like to buy the place, knock it down and build the nicest clubhouse in this entire region!
At this point, I’d like to touch upon another lie my opponent likes to tell; that I or the City made some sort of backroom deal with Orcutt, because we didn’t try to attract other bidders. This negotiation with Orcutt was taking place at a time when COVID was killing the restaurant businesses in our City. Several had temporarily closed, a few would never reopen. When the news that the City was entertaining Orcutt’s offer became public, only one local restaurant approached the City (via a conversation with our Director of Recreation) asking for consideration. We responded by letting them know in general, the terms Orcutt was offering: he was willing to pay $60K to purchase the gutted clubhouse and pavilion. He would convert the pavilion into a temporary clubhouse by adding a kitchen, bar, and climate control system; He would demolish the clubhouse and build and operate the new one under very restrictive conditions that it would have to serve the needs of Muni and it’s golfers during the golf season. It would go on the City’s tax roles, first with a PILOT and then after five years at full assessment. When our Recreation Director relayed these terms the party said they were not interested in pursuing anything similar.
But let me be clear, I TAKE FULL RESPONSIBILITY for championing the move to sell the damaged clubhouse and pavilion to Mr. Orcutt. I did it because it was a very credible opportunity to get a much better clubhouse than the one the City had ruined and were trying to rebuild and at the same time be able to reduce the deficit of the number one most fiscally stressed city in New York State by $1.6 million.
I was hoping we found a credible way to answer the question those three accountants in the NYS Comptroller's office had asked me during my first week as Mayor, without closing, leasing or selling the golf course.
It did not work out, but during Orcutt’s ownership, the improvements he made to the pavilion provided golfers with a temporary, full service clubhouse. And, we were also able to devote the resources necessary to make a dramatic improvement to Muni's playing conditions. Plus we have a fully equipped temporary clubhouse pavilion we can lease out and continue to use while Phase II gets completed.
It's time fore more!
