BLUEWATER BAY — The owners of Bluewater Bay’s golf courses have decided to close the Magnolia course rather than shorten four of its holes and sell the extra land for housing.
Bluewater Bay Resort LLC withdrew its plans from Okaloosa County on Monday, and a special public hearing before the County Commission scheduled for Thursday evening has been canceled.
Bluewater Bay Resort LLC submitted plans in January to shorten holes 4, 6, 7 and 9 on the Magnolia and use the land to build up to 48 single-family homes and some multi-family units.
“Our concept of keeping it open for a short course and marketing to families and children, women and older people was a great idea,” said Tom Hanks, supervisor of Bluewater Bay’s golf courses. “They (opponents) felt the change in what little development was going (in) would affect their property values, but I think they got it backwards.
“(The board of directors) would rather have it return to Mother Nature than have any type of development or any type of golf operation that they felt wasn’t viable,” he added.
Bluewater Bay Resort will close the Magnolia course May 1 and the property eventually will be fenced in to prevent people from trespassing, Hanks said. His staff will stop maintaining it.
“The only winners will be the wildlife, basically,” Hanks said.
Three other nine-hole courses — the Marsh, Bay and Lake — will remain open.
“We’re going to put all of our money and efforts into 27 holes and make those the best 27 holes. Hopefully, we can achieve that with the savings we’ve got on the Magnolia course.”
Although more than 1,500 letters had been filed with the county protesting the original plan, Tallahassee attorney Robert Apgar said the main reason it was pulled was because the county’s staff was imposing unreasonable standards of review on the proposal.
Apgar said the staff could not determine whether the proposal was consistent with Bluewater Bay’s comprehensive plan unless more detailed plans were submitted.
“In our view — and people on our team have been doing this for a long time — we have never seen that much detailed plans requested from a project at this stage,” Apgar said. “The expense of producing that and additional time that the county was apparently not willing to give us, my clients just couldn’t afford to spend any more time or money on it.”
Raimund Herden, president of Bluewater Investors Ltd. and one of the original developers of Bluewater Bay, said he was not surprised to learn the proposal had been withdrawn.
Herden said he never liked the plan to shorten the Magnolia, partly because it was too far from the clubhouse to be a course that people walked rather than drove carts to play.
He said the homeowners association preferred having the Magnolia course closed over having its holes shortened and the land redeveloped.
“Everybody at Bluewater is interested to find the solution,” Herden said. “We have to sit down and discuss it and start a dialogue, but they didn’t want a dialogue. They just did what they wanted to do. Now whatever they will do in the future will be more difficult because they lost the confidence (of the homeowners).
“Their plan was not thoughtful enough,” he added. “They should have thought before they did it. It was a plan (that) from the very beginning was not viable and didn’t make sense. But they never listened, they didn’t want no dialogue.”
Contact Daily News Business Editor Dusty Ricketts at 850-315-4448 or dricketts@nwfdailynews.com. Follow him on Twitter @DustyRnwfdn.