After more than 50 years of negotiations, one of Texas’s oldest public golf courses, a landmark in the state’s civil rights progress, has received a lifeline to stay open.<\/p>\n
On Wednesday, the City of Austin and The University of Texas at Austin announced a proposed agreement to transfer\u00a0ownership of Lions Municipal Golf Course\u2014known publicly as Muny\u2014to the city, with a focus on preserving open public green space and the historic public course. The golf course, which opened in 1924 on over 140 acres of university-owned property along Lady Bird Lake, occupies land the City of Austin began leasing from the UT in 1937 as part of the greater\u00a0Brackenridge Tract.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The deal would amend the 1989 Brackenridge Development Agreement between the two entities, which\u00a0outlined how the University could use the land it owned on either side of Lake Austin Boulevard for private development.<\/p>\n
“This is a great day for Austin,” said Austin Mayor Kirk Watson in a statement. “Our community has been working for more than 50 years to save Muny. That work and our strong partnership with the University have paid off and now we will be able to preserve this precious greenspace and a key part of not only Austin’s history, but the entire country’s.”<\/p>\n
That history includes Lions Municipal becoming the first public golf course in the South to voluntarily desegregate four years before the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education\u00a0ruling in 1955.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“The University of Texas at Austin is working with the City to define a path forward for the University’s future development and use of the Brackenridge tract in west Austin that honors our fiduciary responsibilities and stewardship obligations, which we will ultimately take to our Board of Regents’ for consideration,” the University said in a statement. “We are immensely grateful to anonymous donors who have stepped in with a generous gift proposal to UT Austin to help facilitate a resolution that serves our students, the Austin community, and Texas for years to come.”<\/p>\n
According to the City of Austin, Lions Municipal is Austin’s most-used public course, hosting more than 75,000 rounds of golf annually.<\/p>\n
“This is an exciting opportunity that has been long in the making,” Austin City Manager T.C. Broadnax said. “Development in this special area, along Lady Bird Lake, must be thoughtful and executed with the deepest care. The agreement will enable both the City and the University to guide development in a way that accomplishes each of our goals. I appreciate and value our partnership with UT that has allowed us to reach this important milestone.”<\/p>\n
Since 1973, golf legend Ben Crenshaw and the Muny Conservancy have joined community advocates and city leaders in fighting to keep the lease between the two parties from expiring. The\u00a0fear from those in support of keeping Lions Municipal open, is that the University would essentially bulldoze the land to make it suitable for high-density commercial or residential development in a prime area in Austin.<\/p>\n
Next steps for the city include briefing the Environmental and Planning Commission on the proposal later this month and Austin’s City Council on Nov. 19. In addition to transferring ownership of Muny, the proposed amendment would describe the general process for creating a Tax Increment Reinvestment Zone (TIRZ) in the area.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"After more than 50 years of negotiations, one of Texas’s oldest public golf courses, a landmark in the…","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":15271,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"csco_display_header_overlay":false,"csco_singular_sidebar":"","csco_page_header_type":"","csco_page_load_nextpost":"","csco_post_video_location":[],"csco_post_video_location_hash":"","csco_post_video_url":"","csco_post_video_bg_start_time":0,"csco_post_video_bg_end_time":0,"csco_post_video_bg_volume":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[8301,3350,1705,1706,768,769,623,624],"class_list":["post-15270","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-texas","tag-chron-college","tag-chrongolf","tag-chronsports","tag-chronsportsbiz","tag-chronstaff","tag-chrontexas","tag-texas","tag-texas-golf","cs-entry","cs-video-wrap"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/vive.im\/@fogolf\/117440891074882760","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fogolf.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15270","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fogolf.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fogolf.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fogolf.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fogolf.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15270"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.fogolf.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15270\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fogolf.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15271"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fogolf.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15270"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fogolf.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15270"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fogolf.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15270"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}