Hacienda Riquelme - Golf Course Condition

Following numerous concerns, complaints and vociferous comments over the last weeks regarding the very poor current condition of our Hacienda Riquelme golf course, an on-course inspection meeting took place last week (23/4/14) between Colin Archer (HR Committee member responsible for Golf), Enrique Herrero (Director General of IRM - the golf course owners) and Francisco Allo (Head greenkeeper from Selprats - the golf course maintenance company).

The topics of discussion during the inspection were the very poor condition of the greens, the lack of water in the lakes, the increasing damage to tees and fairways being caused by rabbits, the hardness of the sand in the bunkers and the poor condition of the netting around the driving range after damage suffered in recent high winds. The netting is being replaced as this is being written.

Below is the communication the Committee has subsequently received from Enrique Herrero of IRM which we pass to you …...

“Here I include the explanation of the situation of the golf course that we have been having for the last weeks. Please resend it to the rest of the HR residents as an official statement coming from the IRM company.

 1) The grass variety in Hacienda Riquelme is Paspalum Vaginatum that gets the winter appearance once the temperature is below 7 degrees. This means that during the winter presents a brown appearance and without any signs of activity. In order to avoid this poor appearance during the winter we have to do several re-seeds of other varieties that are more resistant to the winter temperatures but don´t stand the high summer temperatures, so that they start to die gradually during the summer, helped by the application of some herbicides to end up with a playing surface which is fully Paspalum. The last re-seed was with Poa Trivialis.

The consequence of doing this operation year by year is a weakness of the original variety (Paspalum Vaginatum) as well as a contamination of bad seeds that end up spoiling the condition of the greens. To avoid this damage it is convenient to stop the re-seeding for one or two consecutive years within a period of 10 years. The problem of those years is that the aesthetic appearance of the greens is very poor even on the first stages of the spring phase, and it also affects the rolling of the ball.

What is more, the growing of the Paspalum in spring is very irregular as you can see in the fairways of Alhama, Saurines or Hacienda Riquelme. It also depends on the year; there are some years with long periods of evolution as unlikely the current year. There are physiological aspects that don´t have a simple explanation but in general, it is much more difficult when the autumn temperatures fall very fast and the spring season we have alternatively very warm weeks with cold days in the middle.

In this moment we are mowing the grass daily, using the rollers and making weekly vertical cuts to accelerate the whole process.

2) Regarding the rabbit damages, the fact that the native areas remain clean of bad seeds means that the rabbits are force to come out of their refuges on to the golf course to eat, chew the grass (main damages) and dig on the bunker sand. Currently we have license to capture them with cages but they got use to those and it is hard for it now to be effective. We are searching for other methods of keeping away those rabbits without needing of capturing them, and we are going to try an ecological repellent that apparently will keep them away.

3) The hardness of the bunker sand is difficult to avoid considering that our irrigation method is with sprinklers. What is more, it needs a certain degree of humidity to settle the sand on the bunkers.

4) Regarding the lakes as you know we are starting to refill the lakes; we have just started with the lake at the eleventh hole and we are going to fill the others gradually.

Thanks for your interest and cooperation

Best Regards,

Enrique Herrero Gil
IRM Director General”

The HR Committee’s own notes and views on this same meeting can be found as an attached document in the minutes of the recent April Committee Meeting held 29/4/14 when they are published.

Colin Archer

HR Committee Member – Golf

2014 May Hacienda Riquelme Newsfeed.........

Optimistic beliefs?

                               

We are frequently asked how all of the problems arose at Hacienda Riquelme Golf Resort and whilst we are not privy to all that has gone on within the confidential committee meetings, we are aware of the communities culture and substantial resort-wide material matters that exist today.

The presidents and the various members of the committee over the last five years have predominately consisted of retired expats that have very little to do having sold up or retired to the resort.

Back home in the UK, they would have had their own properties and gardens to look after, jobs and a local community to interact within. However, at Hacienda Riquelme it is really a ghost town apart from the two busy summer months when the occupancy of the resort grows from less than 100 residents to over 4,000 holiday makers. This was recently commented on and confirmed by a Telegraph Reporter from the UK.

In some parts of the resort it is so quite that even spotting a car moving within the resort is commented upon in the winter months. It can be days and days before anyone sees a new face or for that matter a friendly face out by chance.

So we have a group of expats that are bored out of their minds wanting to be within a committee to relive their boredom. That would be all well if they were to listen to fellow owners suggestions, ideas and problems but this is not an open, honest and transparent resort. It would also be wise if they had the necessary skill sets to manage a multi-million major operational site however, they do not and are lost with the "keys to the sweet shop" attitude.

Time and time again the committee have been asked to live within its means and not spend more than the cash it receives. To chase aggressively each and every debtor and not leave this difficult issue to Resortalia, a local small administration set-up that really does not have the international or for that matter local breadth and knowledge to chase 1.2 million euros of debtors. A clear example is the polaris debt where upon local sub communities were asked not to budget for these garage spaces in the 2015 community fees yet the general resort budgeted for the substantial town centre community fees for polaris based upon the committee decisions!

For every penny spent the committee really need to understand that it is not their money, their pockets but ours, each one of the 1,864 owners within Hacienda Riquelme. Time and time again they have signed contracts with insufficient local expertise or local benchmarked costings resulting in higher prices and profits to a select few companies

They really do need to engage and listen to the locally born population of owners that do have valid opinions and expertise, they can always help if they are ever called upon to be part of the decision making process.

Instead, their views are sidelined and material matters such as the empty lakes, the gardening contract, the workers compound, polaris strips and local costings are never considered.

We have previously called for a boycott of the Sub Community president positions as taking part in thee elections when the sub community presidents are never listened too or communicated too is really a complete waste of time. It is encouraging to note that a substantial number of owners took part in this boycott with the lowest level of attendance at the AGM in March 2014.

As we move forward the committee will move somewhat in our direction as can be seen by the implementation of the EUCC which we have called for some 2007. Now that this is implemented then perchance the golf course may start to pay their community fees having been a free loader for the past seven years.

The polaris lawsuit settlement was another clear example where the committee took the first offer on the table at 10% of the awards required to correct the building defects. This award now looks to be opportunist as the first instalment was not paid on time in Feb 2014. How on earth each sub community will fix their buildings defects with only 10% of the funds required beggers belief.

In closing,  a lot depends on the golf course company and their use of the water in the lakes to irrigate the golf course.

Now that one of the major lakes is now bone dry then it will only be a matter of time before all of the lakes are empty. Now is the time to grap the bull by its horns and clearly challenge the status quo otherwise we will end up with similar messes as other resorts.

Time will tell……………….. But sadly not within the Presidents monthly newsletters as these no longer appear, we wonder why no comments since December 2013!

So much for open and honest transparency and communications!