Navy to Keep Beachhead on Golf Links After Long Beach Pullout

Although the Long Beach Naval Station is scheduled to close by the end of the decade because of Pentagon budget cuts, two popular military-run golf courses sought by local developers will remain open.

Private developers say that the 280 acres of land that the Navy has used for its golf courses since 1966--an 18-hole “destroyer” course and a companion nine-hole “cruiser” course--would probably fetch millions on the market. But Long Beach Naval Station officials say that under a plan being reviewed, they expect to keep their greens open even after the base shuts down.

“It’s a quality of life thing,” said Lt. Cmdr. Steve Chesser, a spokesman for the naval station’s operations branch. “We want to make things as good as we can for the people who will stay here on active duty. (The military) can be an arduous life that often involves hazardous duty and separation from family, and anything we can do to make it a little nicer, we will. . . .

“And besides that,” Chesser added, “it generates money.”

Chesser said the busy Los Alamitos courses, open to current and retired military personnel of all ranks and services and their guests, have turned an annual profit of about $100,000 in recent years. This profit is used to fund other military recreational programs at the Long Beach base, such as the gymnasium and the swimming pool, he said.

But Joe Guerra thinks the military could make even more by privatizing its 380 courses across the country.

Guerra is senior vice president of American Golf Corp. in Santa Monica, which operates more than 140 courses nationwide, and his company has been talking with military officials over the last four years about the possibility of running their links.

With 34 U.S. bases slated for closure under a plan approved this summer by Congress, Guerra says that the timing is ideal for such a move. And he says the Los Alamitos courses would prove particularly attractive to the private sector.

“It’s in a densely populated and undersupplied golfing area. If they decided to sell or lease it, there would be a lot of interest in doing so,” he said, estimating that the golf courses would be worth $5 million to $10 million to a private operator.

Pentagon spokeswoman Jan Walker said specific decisions on how to go about closing bases around the country are being left to service and base commanders, with input from local communities. “It’s done on a case-by-case basis,” Walker said.

For their part, Long Beach naval base officials have no plans to sell or lease a course that has played host to military dignitaries and others for a quarter-century, Chesser said.

Instead, under a plan being reviewed at Naval Fleet Headquarters in Hawaii, authority over the golf courses would be transferred from the naval station to the Long Beach Naval Shipyard, which has thus far been spared closure by Pentagon officials.

There would be no change in the running of the course, he said.

Because of the expected closures of the naval station and the naval hospital in Long Beach, Chesser said, all but about 4,000 of the 16,000 active Navy personnel in Long Beach will probably end up leaving the area.

With a shrunken pool of golfers, Chesser said, “we expect (profits at the golf course) may go down, but only a little bit.” He said the many retired military personnel and non-Navy service personnel who use the course will probably fill the gap.