Washington, DC, has three public 18-hole courses and Donald Trump flies over one of them on Marine One on a regular basis, the Blue Course at East Potomac Golf Linksa Walter Travis layout that has been a mainstay for all golfers in the nation’s capital for nearly a century.
For the past half-decade, a group of golf professionals, doing their nonprofit business as the National Links Trust, has methodically raised money and pulled an endless wheel of red tape in the name of rehabilitating these three courses: Rock Creek, Langston and East Potomac. They were going in that order as the East Potomac facility, while dilapidated, is more than dilapidated, the Rock Creek course has been on death watch for years, and the Langston course is somewhere in between. Doctors go where there is bleeding.
That’s how it was then.
In an interview Monday, the two founders of the National Links Trust said Trump, aided and abetted by Interior Department officials and his golf interests, is planning to step in and remove the NLT team, as first reported by Wall Street Journal at the end of last week. (The properties are owned, essentially, by the National Park Service, an Interior Department agency.) With 45 years left on it, the National Links Trust’s 50-year lease on the three properties will expire, said co-founders Will Smith and Mike McCartin. NLT had expected that Tom Doak would do a plain and simple renovation of the Blue Course on a pro bono basis, just as Gil Hanse is currently doing at Rock Creek and Beau Welling is on board to do at Langston. Now they expect Tom Fazio, one of Trump’s course architects for his golf properties, to take the job.
“We’re devastated, just devastated,” Smith said Monday. “We believe that golf itself is a public good, that golf teaches a lot of great life values,” Smith said, and the group was taking its cues from that sentiment. If you know Trump’s golf values, they are very different, as his courses are dramatic and showy, often with towering waterfalls, perfect cart paths and hot dogs on the turn that, for Trump, are the best in the world.
Smith and McCartin, by contrast, wanted the Blue Course to be what it always was, a user-friendly course with modest green fees, but in its future, a new and improved condition, a course with more interesting topographic and design features, unspoiled views of the Potomac River and healthier grass. As they understand it, Trump, working with Fazio, will want a course with lakes and mounds that is suitable for tournament play. It’s an easy prediction to make because that’s a broad description of most of Trump’s courses. “We didn’t have any desire to make it expensive and fancy,” Smith said. In golf, as in other matters, Trump’s stock in trade is expensive and fancy. As Trump told him diary“I think what we’re looking to do is just build something different and build them into government.”
You know the chilling speed with which Trump oversaw the demolition of the East Wing of the White House and approved a first and now a second set of plans to build luxury halls in its place? “I think they’re looking to do the exact same thing” in East Potomac, Smith said, in terms of speed and determination, with little, if any, input from the public.
A text message and a phone call to an Interior Department official, William Doffermyre, who is familiar with Trump’s thinking on the project, were not returned. Not even a text message to Tom Fazio or an email interview request to the White House press office. last week, Fazio told GOLF.com that he had a two-hour lunch with Trump at the White House in November. He was not asked about his possible involvement in the Blue Course work then, but noted Trump’s pride in taking dirt from the East Wing project and throwing it behind a chain-link fence on the East Potomac Golf Estate. “He’s a construction guy,” Fazio said.
Truckloads of dirt from the East Wing renovation project have arrived in East Potomac.
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The National Links Trust has been anticipating leaving for months, after Trump began showing interest in the Blue Course in early August. Smith and McCartin believe, based on what administration officials and others have told them, that their lease will be terminated because they did not meet certain stated goals by certain dates. If that’s true, the men said, it’s only because they’re working, as McCartin put it, “by the book,” including dozens of community and agency presentations, getting environmental assessments and approvals from the Commission of Fine Arts, the National Capital Planning Commission and the Office of Historic Preservation. Any Trump watcher knows he’s a big-picture guy, drawn to big messages and big topics. Golf course work on federal land is a painstaking process, or it can be.
There is no clear pattern to what the National Links Trust had hoped to do. Many active golfers are familiar with major renovation projects at Harding Park in San Francisco, Park in West Palm Beach and Cobbs Creek in Philadelphia. Smith and McCartin said those projects are not models for their vision for the Blue Course. “When you design a course with a $250 visitor fee and $50 home fee, it still has to meet the expectations of the golfer paying $250,” Smith said. In other words, something spectacular, in design, ambience and comfort. McCartin grew up playing the Blue Course. He would like players there to experience what he experienced: good golf, no fuss, at an affordable price.
“We went through the hard work of determining why this work is, on balance, a public good,” Smith said. “We’re saying, here’s our project, here’s what impact it will have on you. What the president is doing is setting himself up to bypass the public engagement process.
“We’re waiting for a termination letter,” Smith said.
The National Links Trust has several powerful and capable lawyers assisting it on a pro bono basis. The Interior Department has 200 attorneys in DC alone.
“We’re going to have our party tonight,” Smith said Monday afternoon. He received an annual salary of $50,000 for his NLT work, most of which he donated to the trust, he said. “We’re going out with a bang.”
;)
