Bidding to replace the historic town-owned course’s first tee and ninth green was made necessary after selectmen decided to use part of the course’s property to construct Southborough’s new combined police and fire stations. But costs submitted by vendors have been nearly double what the town has set aside for the work.
For the second time, selectmen in Southborough, Mass. have rejected bids to reconstruct part of the historic, town-owned Southborough Golf Club, the MetroWest Daily News reported.
The work is needed to keep the golf course open as the town builds its new $22.6 million combined police and fire stations being built on part of the property, the Daily News reported.
An architecture firm, The Northeast Golf Company in Rhode Island, has redesigned the locations of the first tee box and ninth green to reroute the 9-hole course around the new building, the Daily News reported. As part of the construction of the new building, the clubhouse was also relocated to make way for the new station. The new ninth green will be placed in what is now woods.
The problem in getting the work underway, however, has been the cost.
The latest rounds of bids came in the range of $514,000 to $557,000 for the work, the Daily News reported, while the town only has $340,000 set aside in Community Preservation Act money for the project, according to Town Administrator Mark Purple.
Purple, during the board’s meeting last week, recommended that it reject three bids in the best interest of the town, the Daily News reported. The board then unanimously voted to do so.
The selectmen also rejected a sole bid for $607,000 for the work last month, the Daily News reported.
Before rebidding the project, the town worked with the architecture firm to reduce the scale of work, the Daily News reported.
“I have been working with the golf committee and they are coming up with a phasing approach on what to address first and what we should use the funds on,” Purple told the board last week. “We would like to do some bidding on individual pieces.”
The most important work is for the ninth green, while other parts can be fixed as more money becomes available, Purple told the Daily News.
“Hopefully, we will have more targeted bidding that will happen over the course of the winter so we can get going with some of this work as soon as the ground thaws in the spring,” he said.
The town bought the historic course from St. Mark’s School at the end of 2017 to build the new police and fire station (https://clubandresortbusiness.com/town-buys-st-marks-gc-land-swap-deal/), and then renamed it as Southborough GC, which is the name it had when it originally opened in the late 1890s (https://clubandresortbusiness.com/st-marks-gc-return-original-name/). New England Golf Corporation of Westwood operates and maintains the course, the Daily News reported, and has shortened the first hole and built a temporary ninth green in anticipation of the rerouting project.
The plan uses about six acres of the course to build the public safety building and to place a permanent conservation restriction on the remaining land—approximately 90 percent of the property, the Daily News reported.