New York State is back open. Very precise instructions.
Two different "lobbying" groups at work. Private Club Owners Association and an ad-hoc group for upstate, non-municipal, public courses, with separate clienteles and agendas.
This will all be going out on BG.C twitter this afternoon:
-Twitter comments come from rules established by NYS Club Association.
-The private clubs took a set of rules they felt were good for their members and got the go ahead from ESD.
-Gave it to NYSED and NYSED said ok. These rules were designed to benefit private courses. (NYSED is NYS economic development organization)
-This interpretation was then sent to NYSGA, who disseminated the information.
-NYSGA is not engaged in lobbying. They are only disseminating information they receive.
-National Golf Course Owners association which represents privately owned public golf courses helped start a working group of courses in NYS to work with the State to open golf back up.
-A working-group of about 30 upstate courses (NY Golf Alliance) is working with NYS senators, Assemblymen, County Executives, etc, who took this to the NYSED for a new interpretation regarding the use of motorized golf carts.
-The NYSED said, golf carts are ok, but you cannot have a separate or non-essential employees in to distribute the carts.
-Courses plan to open the cart barn, put keys in cart, take one cart yourself.
-NYSED is permitting starters (security) and grounds crew.
-One example course has 116 carts.
-After use, those carts will be returned by the golfers to a staging area, and will be cleaned by the owner.
-Additionally Grounds crew has historically maintained golf carts, so that falls under their hierarchy of responsibility.
-The closing of golf wasn’t caused by courses that violated the rules, it was the optics of the way in which people should behave on the golf course. Many people outside of golf complained that golf should not be open when so many other businesses are closed; it was not essential to our elected leaders. Elected leaders opted to close golf and push the consideration to later in the spring. But as people become more and more in need of outdoor activities during this crisis, they are now responding by allowing a bit of room to re-open golf courses (and other outdoor activities like marinas).
- New NYSED Determination is doing its best to allow golf for the public (as opposed to only private club members) under the conditions contained in the Executive Order. Permitting the use of carts without use of non-essential employees is as much as they could do at this point.
-The NY Golf Alliance is working hard to make the activity of golf available and accessible to all New Yorkers, public and private club members.