BUENAVENTURA MUNICIPAL GOLF COURSE
Inundated by winter 2023 floods that closed the 90-year old municipal mainstay for close to two years, many thought that the course would never reopen. Many thought the course should not re-open. But an active, engaged golf community thought differently. When combined with the serendipitous circumstance of Ventura’s employment of a Deputy City Manager with long experience in military contract management, the city was able to combine his skills with FEMA savvy consultants in charting a path toward securing the federal dollars required to flood-proof a redesigned Buenaventura Golf Course – “flood proof” in the sense of allowing flood waters to recede while protecting the greens and tees from encroachment. In the meantime, the city worked with its management tenant (Kemper Sports) to restore 14 holes on a temporary basis. That 14-hole layout opened earlier this year, and as of Monday (August 18) that layout has been extended to 18 holes.
Tee time booking is open online 8 days prior to the date of desired play at www.buenaventuragolf.com or via telephone between 7:00 AM and 7:00 PM at (805) 677-6772.
OAK CREEK GOLF CLUB
Known throughout Southern California as one very successful daily fee golf course, Oak Creek plays host to 70,000 rounds of golf per year and offers separate practice-only memberships for its large state-of-the-art practice facility at a guest fee schedule of $180-$230 for 14-day advance reservations, $210-$260 for 6-week advance reservations, $110-$140 for advance “twilight” time reservations, and $130 for senior citizen reservations (55+). Small buckets of range balls go for $18; large buckets for $24. There are two “membership” programs that reduce these fees – a “Gold” program for $15,000.00 per year that offers much in the way of access notwithstanding the facility’s high usage rate and a lesser one that for roughly $570 per year offers discounted rates that shave roughly 25-40% off the “guest fee” schedule.
Bottom line: Oak Creek is the kind of financially successful daily fee golf operation that many in the golf community thought made it immune from any proposal to repurpose it. They thought wrong. In late May the Irvine City Council authorized the City Manager to work with the Irvine Company to come up with a plan to turn the golf complex and some contiguous open space into 3,100 housing units.
Based on challenges issued by former Irvine Mayors, Council Members, and Irvine Company employees to the effect that a1988 ballot initiative had designated the land atop which Oak Creek sits open/recreational space, the current Irvine City Council subsequently directed its City Attorney to develop language for a ballot initiative that would put the issue to the voters a second time or in the opinion of those who have argued that the 1988 initiative did not create such a designation, a first time.
On August 13, the Irvine City Attorney brought back four (4) versions of such a ballot initiative and asked the City Council to approve one of them for placement on a special election ballot.
Instead of approving one of the four (4) ballot options, Mayor Agran moved and the Council unanimously approved a motion to continue the whole matter until the 1st quarter of 2026 to coincide with placement of a possible ballot initiative on the June ballot as part of the scheduled statewide election. This gives the "Save Open Space" group plenty of time to qualify their own ballot initiative in competition with whatever the City Council might decide in terms of ballot language and gives those communities opposed to the conversion, including the golf community, ample time to both express opposition and perhaps work with the Council on ballot language offering much greater flexibility in terms of preserving some measure of golf on those 315 acres than the ballot language that was put in front of them by the City Attorney.
Roughly 50 persons testified on the 13th, all but two of them in opposition to the proposed project, some simply expressing opposition, others preferring to focus on some of the legal and technical problems with the ballot language as proposed by the City Attorney. One of the things that was strikingly different from the meeting back in May when the Council authorized the City Manager to work with the Irvine Company to find common ground on a proposal to repurpose the golf property as a housing project was the opposition that came from some of Irvine's business groups, a labor union, and some community organizations, all of which counterbalanced some of the business and community organizations that testified in favor of the proposal back in May.
Only a clairvoyant or a fool would deign to predict where this episode will end, but unlike when we first reported on this matter, events subsequent to late May promise the strong possibility of a better end – better that is in terms of saving some semblance of public golf in the heart of Irvine. Stay tuned.
Oak Creek and Buenaventura are just the latest in a long list of examples of public golf courses that once looked lost that in one case is on its way to complete restoration and in the other on its way to something more than the dust bin of history, how much “more” remains to be seen. But it would hardly be the first example of a public golf course thought completely lost that turned out to be 100% saved. Time will tell. It always does. And it always says better things for those who persist.
(Excerpt from August 2025 California Alliance for Golf Newsletter – Click here for full story.)