Golf Is In The ‘Fore’ Cast
Course Should Be Complete In Fall 2007, Open Soon After
By Dan Parker
South Jetty Reporter
July 20, 2006

In 2002, Craig Millard announced plans for Newport Villages, a development on both sides of State Hwy. 361 that is expected to include more than 2,000 homes, more than one hotel, a boat marina and an 18-hole signature Arnold Palmer links-style course.
Millard, a former president of Merrill Lynch Real Estate, is partnering in the overall project with Sunny Castor of Port Aransas.
Construction has begun on one golf course, with heavy equipment moving tons of soil along more than 200 acres of land on both sides of the highway just south of Beach Access Road 1A.
Millard, who lives in Palm Beach, Fla., and Newport, R.I., recently was interviewed by the South Jetty about the golf course. Here are some of the basics of the course, as explained by Millard.
· The first three holes of the course will lie on 47 acres of land on the bay side of State Hwy. 361. The remaining 15 holes will stretch along 190 acres on the beach side of the highway, with some of the fairways winding amid dunes.
· It will be an Arnold Palmer signature course, which means the world-famous pro golfer personally is overseeing decisions involved in how the course is designed and built. “He is taking great pride in this course,” Millard said.
· It will be a par 71 course with more than 7,000 yards of fairways and greens. The lengths of various holes are not set in stone, but the longest hole right now is the 10th hole, at 590 yards.
· Millard said he expects the course to be suitable for everyone from beginning golfers to pros, with five tee boxes for each hole.
· Millard said the course probably will be “largely finished” in fall 2007 and open to the public “sometime shortly after that.” He said he could not be specific about opening dates because weather could affect construction efforts.
· No decisions have been made about the cost of using the course, Millard said, adding that “a lot depends on usage.”
· It will be a public golf course in that anyone can play if they get an appointment, a tee time. However the course will be privately owned and retain some characteristics of a private course, including a dress code. Some facilities will be private, he said.
· It will be a links-style course. Links courses can vary some in appearance, but a traditional links course likely will be seaside, with sandy soil, a natural layout, natural seaside grasses, few if any trees, and many small, deep bunkers.

The course will be on both sides of the highway because it would have been too cramped to keep it all on one side, Millard said. Because the course will be on both sides of the highway, golf carts will have to get from one side of the highway to the other, but just how that will happen has not yet been decided.
“It’s really up to TxDOT (the Texas Department of Transportation),” Millard said. “I don’t want to get into their politics but they have their three alternatives. One is that the golf carts drive back and forth across the highway at a flashing light, like they do all over America, (or) have a bridge over the highway, (or) have a tunnel under the highway. And Tx-DOT is in favor of a tunnel.” Millard said be believes a tunnel makes the most sense, too. Asked who would pay for a tunnel, Millard said, “it would be a little bit of a joint responsibility.” A tunnel would be available only for carts, Millard said. Because the water table is fairly shallow on Mustang Island, constructing a tunnel under the highway would mean “a slight gradation in the highway…over a long distance,” Millard said.
Millard said he also expects a traffic light to be installed at Access Road 1 to make it a wide boulevard lined with trees and other landscaping.
Water from ponds on the course and effluent from the sewage treatment plant in Port Aransas will be used to water the course. Millard said the Leonabelle Turnbull Birding Center also will get the first 500,000 gallons of effluent daily, which is no less than what the birding center is getting now. Nutrients from effluent are a part of the food chain that attracts birds to the birding center.
Millard said the golf course also is planning to build a reclamation system that will collect water in low spots on the course where a lot of irrigation is taking place. That water will be re-used on the course.
The links style of the course will be exciting for golfers., Millard said.
“They are the Mecca of golf courses, if it’s a true links course,” Millard said, “Although they’ve tried to recreate them all over the world, a true links course really should be right adjacent to an ocean or to a major sea….They’re real beautiful, they tend to be windswept, they tend to be very natural and the less that man does to alter them, the better they are. And so you play the way nature laid it. You just mow some grass down the middle and you play it the way nature intended those hills and valleys to be. The thing that makes it so tough is, the rough tends to be very rough…and (another thing) that people love and hate is they tend to be very windy. The wind comes off the ocean and just plays havoc with the golf game.”
This course “may be the last (links course) to be built” in the coastal United States due to suburban sprawl that has eaten up so many coastal areas, Millard said.
While true links-style courses tend to be in coastal areas, they tend not to have fresh water actually on the courses. Millard said he wanted the course to have fresh water, so ponds—golfers call them lakes—are being built, and they will be good for birds.
Designers of the golf course want parts of the golf course to be difficult because that makes it more interesting to the excellent golfers, and the course then will gain a reputation among top-flight golfers, Millard said. But Millard said he wants to make sure the course is playable for beginning golfers while also fun for advanced golfers.
“Two of our holes in the sand dunes, 14 and 15, are very, very difficult holes,” Millard said. “Some golfers are going to say, ‘Wow, this is really exciting. Best thing since sliced bread.’ But for an average golfer like me, they’re killers. So …we’ve actually got a new plan on these two holes. They are right smack dab in the middle of the dunes, and we’re going to have to expand the fairways a little bit here. So, we will have to go back to the town in the next two or three weeks and get on the agenda to slightly alter this dune permit.” Millard said he doesn’t expect the request to become a contentious issue.
“One of the great things about the way this course is shaping up is we have not taken away the dunes, as you can see,” Millard said. “We are building dunes, and that is very unusual…I mean, they’re very, very expensive, they’re tens of thousands of dollars a piece, and we’re building them all over the place. So we’re building dunes behind the dunes, we’re building dunes in the dunes….We now have a massive fortification against the sea. A very, very positive thing. A very environmentally appropriate thing.
Millard talked about the tall dirt berms being built along the highway.
“We do want this to be an oasis for people when they’re playing,” Millard said “No one wants to be next to a highway, striking a golf ball....We do have appropriate setbacks, but not for noise, so our idea was to literally dune the highway. So we will have a relief on this entire project that is more beautiful than nature could have made it.”
Millard said it’s not likely that golf balls will fly off the course and into traffic on State Hwy. 361 because holes are positioned so that golfers will be hitting away from the highway rather that toward it. In addition, the highway-hugging berms—some up to 19 feet high—will also block balls, he said.
Millard said he wanted to apologized to the community for the clouds of sand that have blown off the golf course construction area in recent weeks, prompting some complaints that vehicles, boats and homes in nearby neighborhoods had been dusted.
“I was driving down the highway and saw a cloud of blowing sand, and I thought it was really wrong,” Millard said. He said he got the course’s designers and builders together to discuss a solution.
“Everything is going to be seeded with grass,” he said. “Then that seed will die off and then the proper seed for the golf course will be put on. It’s a very expensive thing….But I said I want it done.”
Workers also are controlling blowing sand by taking the vegetation scraped up by heavy equipment during earth-moving operations and putting the scraped-up vegetation atop the berms. They also are installing “a pre-irrigation system” that will help with the problem.
“Everyone has stepped up, everyone has recognized the problem, and it will be much, much better,” Millard said. “It won’t be totally eradicated for sure, but it will be much, much better.”
Millard said he doesn’t believe the golf course ever will make a profit. But he still wants to build it “because we said we’re going to do it (and) it’s a beautiful thing,” Millard said. “It’s very hard to have a community that’s complete and well-rounded without biking trails and hiking trails and golf courses and tennis clubs….It’s what we needed here.”
How much is the golf course costing to build? Millard: ”It’s hard to say, because we’re having—we’re put at a tremendous disadvantage in one respect because we’re dealing with taxing authorities on the value of the golf course land. And I would make the case that a golf course, if it is never going to make a profit, it has no economic value. So what’s it worth? And that’s something that ultimately may have to play out in the courts. Who knows?
“They originally wanted to tax the golf course land at $25 million, just the land alone. So that’s your base start. Now I think we ended up at somewhere around $9 million in the discussion. It’s still an outrageous number. It has effectively very little value. Now, if it was a private course, then the public was not allowed in there, you could make that argument….The value of the land if we were to put housing on it—which we are legally allowed to do—if it was housing, the value, what we gave up, is probably somewhere in the neighborhood of $50 to $70 million….Many national developers who wanted to partner with us that we talked to around the country said, “Don’t build a golf course. You’re crazy. That’s housing. You don’t need it. There are enough people who will buy (a home) without a golf course.’ If there was another (course) in Port Aransas, I might have been inclined to go that way. But, oh well. Here we are.”
Millard said he expects the golf course to help the Port Aransas economy by bringing in visitors who might not normally have come here.
“And golfers tend to be big spenders,” Millard said. “They are middle, upper-middle and kind of wealthy people, and they spend a lot of money in town. When people go out to play golf and they go out to dinner afterwards, they are drinking good wine and having big steaks.”

danparker@portasouthjetty.com
(361)290-3366