TEE TIME BROKERING – REVISITED
The policies adopted by the City and County of Los Angeles and other major Southern California municipal systems last summer to counter the effects of illicit tee time brokering continue to keep the brokers at bay. For how long, nobody knows. As long as major municipal systems continue to set prices to match their professed missions of offering the game on affordable and accessible bases as opposed to letting the market set prices, there will continue to be incentives for third parties to take advantage of the difference for themselves.
It is important at the outset of any discussion of tee time distribution/sale/allocation to distinguish the arrangements that operate outside the confines of consent from those that operate per agreements between 3rd party vendors and owners/managers – otherwise known as mutually beneficial arrangements in which each party brings something of value to the other in exchange for the others’ value/service. The “agreement” specie proliferates in golf and has long provided a valuable service to golfers and the facilities they play. It continues to provide value under the policies adopted in Los Angeles City/County and its imitators.
Golf is hardly alone in this. Any sector that operates by advance reservation – hotels, airlines, restaurants – is susceptible – all in different ways, but susceptible, nonetheless. Like golf, they have adopted various salves specific to their business models and customer needs/wants.
The restaurant industry has elected to go the legislative route, one that I trust those reading these words understand necessitates establishing by legislative declaration an exclusive ownership right in a restaurant reservation that is held only by the owner of the restaurant, albeit a right that can be transferred or shared by express agreement with a 3rd party. With the caveat that any legislative invocation or declaration of an ownership is amenable to judicial challenge on some Constitutional argument, we’ll explore what the various state restaurant associations have been able to achieve in some of the most populous states in the nation, achievements that may offer insights as to what golf may be able to achieve; indeed, at least in one case (New York), golf is actively trying to duplicate, although narrowly and under a unique circumstance that may not be duplicable in other states.
With all the necessary qualifiers and caveats clearly stated, let’s explore some details.
In 2024 New York passed the “Restaurant Reservation Anti-Piracy Act.” From the Act, the key operative section:
“A third-party restaurant reservation service shall not list, advertise, promote, or sell reservations for a food service establishment through the website, mobile application or other platform of such third-party restaurant reservation service without a written agreement between such third-party restaurant reservation service and such food service establishment to include reservations at the food service establishment on such website, mobile application or other platform.”
The “Act” provides relief for two different categories of violation – for restaurants civil penalties and injunctive relief; for patrons, a judicial cause of action.
Florida passed an almost identical version of the New York Act earlier this year. State restaurant associations are taking these two successes and trying to run bills with parallel or in some cases identical language.
The parallels to golf are obvious, and that is likely why a golf version of it was filed earlier this year (March) in the New York Assembly, where it now sits in committee. Called the "Blocking Illegitimate Reservations and Defending Individual Entertainment Act” (“BIRDIE”), the key operative of it is almost identical to the language of the previous year’s Restaurant Reservation Anti-Piracy Act, although different in one very important respect:
“A third-party reservation service shall not list, advertise, promote, or sell reservations for any golf course located within park regions through its website, mobile application or any other platform without a written agreement with the office. Such agreement shall explicitly authorize the third-party service to distribute reservations and shall outline the terms and conditions under which reservations may be made available. Any reservation service operating without such an agreement shall be considered in violation of this section.”
That difference in one very important respect: The specific reference to an agreement “with the office.” The BIRDIE Act provides protection only to the 29 golf courses owned by the State of New York. The rest of the state’s municipal and daily fee golf courses are not included. One would hope that the golf community in the State of New York is working to include them, and maybe it is, but thus far our inquiries on the subject have been met with silence. In either case, should this bill be passed into law, the extension at some point would seem obvious.
While golf is not part of the name of the BIRDIE Act, as is the case with restaurants in the 2024 Act protecting the integrity of restaurant reservations, golf reservations are the only reservations protected under it. Another wrinkle worthy of mention is the fact that all penalties received under the Act are to be deposited into the state’s “Golf Fund.”
So, where does California fit into this discussion? The short answer is AB 1245 (Stefani; D-San Francisco & Lowenthal; D-Long Beach). It carries the same title as the successful restaurant bills in New York and Florida, albeit with California in the lead – “California Restaurant Reservation Anti-Piracy Act.” Its language along with its penalty structure is almost identical as well. Its dispositive section is literally identical:
“A third-party restaurant reservation service shall not list, advertise, promote, or sell reservations for a food service establishment through the website, mobile application, or other platform of the third-party restaurant reservation service without a written agreement between that third-party restaurant reservation service and that food service establishment to include reservations at the food service establishment on that website, mobile application, or other platform.”
AB 1245 did not move in 2025. Its authors pulled it from committee in favor of making it a 2-year bill that will be taken up in January. Whether that means the bill is on life support or something more akin to requiring significant amendment before it has hope of making it through California’s legislative grinder is knowledge we just don’t have at the moment. But it probably behooves us to acquire some.
The National Golf Course Owners Association (NGCOA) has added a day to its biannual Technical Conference (“Tech Con”) this October focused just on this issue. We have to imagine that among the salves it will consider is legislation. Though the legislative path is always an arduous one – a long distance run without guarantee of ever arriving at a finish line – it can offer a more permanent and sustainable solution than the ad hoc salves the industry is likely to keep having to craft to stay ahead of those calculating to extract value from the game’s facilities without providing them benefit.
Food for serious and sustained thought.
CALIFORNIA HAS A 2025-2026 BUDGET
SORT OF
The Legislature and the Governor agreed to a budget deal Friday. We say, “sort of,” because while the basic outlines have been agreed to in sufficient detail to allow for the budget to take effect July 1, many of the details that comprise that “sufficient detail” won’t be fully known until all the trailer bills are published later in the week. For the general purposes that serve our purposes, suffice it to say that while many of the Governor’s proposed cost cutting proposals remain intact, the final budget reflects a softening of many of them. No surprise there. By virtue of the scope of their constituencies, the collective will of a multiplicity of legislators will always favor more spending than a governor whose responsibility is to the whole as opposed to a part thereof.
The cuts lawmakers and the governor agreed to reduce the expansion of state-sponsored healthcare to undocumented immigrants and reinstate asset limit tests for Medi-Cal enrollees, albeit in both cases much less so than Governor Newsom’s budget initially proposed. The plan restores cost-of-living adjustments for child-care workers, which the governor wanted to nix, and rejects his call to cap overtime hours for in-home caregivers. Another $500 million in funding for Homeless Housing, Assistance and Prevention grants were added, despite the Governor’s frustration with the counties for their poor record in reducing homelessness. To make everything balance despite a shortfall that stands at $12 billion before any of the anticipated curtailments coming California’s way from the federal government have been accommodated, the final deal draws down certain accounts, shifts other accounts, defers certain payments, and draws from the rainy day fund as well as certain other cash reserves.
Given that both the governor and the legislature believe that the deficit will grow as the 2025-2026 fiscal year plays out, expect to see a special session this fall to determine how to accommodate it. Deficits in the immediate out years are expected to range from $17-24 billion, presaging some difficult years ahead.
We got one thing right about the 2025 budget in our last newsletter and one thing very wrong. “Wrong” in the sense of failing to anticipate that a stalled piece of legislation would end up being incorporated into the budget as a condition of Governor Newsom’s agreement to any final budget deal.
First, what we got right. The Governor’s proposal to expedite the entitlement processes for the Delta Conveyance Plan is not in the 2025-2026 budget. That doesn’t mean that the Plan is not going to continue moving forward. It just means that it will move through the normal order as opposed to the expedited process that the Legislative Analyst’s Office (LAO) determined constituted a de facto approval on the merits masquerading as an appropriation.
What we got wrong, or more accurately, what we failed to anticipate. Senator Scott Weiner’s (D-San Francisco) SB 607 may have stalled in the 2025 session, but Governor Newsom made a version of it a condition of his approval of the budget that he and the legislature have hammered out. That “version” has not yet been finalized but must be finalized and passed by both Houses before July 1 before the Governor will affix his signature to the budget deal otherwise agreed to.
While not yet finalized, the version of it that the Governor has demanded be sent to him for his signature is contained within AB/SB 131, which makes a number of targeted refinements to strengthen the operational efficiency of CEQA, including but not limited to the following:
- Aligns the standard of review for a lead agency’s determination to adopt a Negative Declaration (ND) or a Mitigated Negative Declaration (MND) to parity with the existing standard of review for Environmental Impact Reports (EIRs).
- Focuses CEQA review on the most germane administrative records by excluding communications of persons tangential or far removed from project decision-making, with specified exemptions.
- Clarifying the existing Class 32 "Infill Development" Categorical Exemption to CEQA by directing the Governor’s Office of Land Use and Climate Innovation (LUCI) to set alternative safe harbor objective standards and clearer geographic standards. These changes will make the existing categorical exemption more usable.
- Exempting re-zonings that are consistent with an already approved housing element from CEQA, recognizing that local jurisdictions must undergo the CEQA process as a part of the housing element adoption process.
Just how much of AB/SB 131 ends up in the budget trailer bill that the Governor has extracted as a condition of his approval of the budget will be determined the last day of the fiscal year Monday, June 30 at a noon Senate Budget Committee hearing. The final results may not appear in print until the end of the week. When they do, we will share them, as this would represent the most comprehensive change in the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) to date even if only a small portion of AB/SB 131 survives the last minute budget hearing.
In the last newsletter we characterized much of the 2025 legislative session’s output as representative of a double edged sword with the following warning that bears repeating in light of SB 607’s resurrection in the form of AB/SB 131:
“On one hand, expediting regulatory and permitting processes offers hope of reducing onerous capital project/construction costs. On the other hand – that ever present and troublesome other hand – the fact is that most if not all of the efforts to expedite those processes are focused on expediting the construction of urban housing, which is reminiscent of the 2021 and 2022 ‘Public Golf Endangerment Acts’ that would have created financial incentives to repurpose municipal golf courses as affordable housing tracts. That should send a few chills down the spine of the golf community. Two hackneyed sayings come to mind: The devil is in the details and be careful what you ask for.”
Final note: For those of you wondering how California’s Open Public Meetings Law (Brown Act) can be reconciled with what you just read, please know that the Brown Act applies to all meetings of bodies that report to any kind of legislative body, including advisory bodies, but does NOT apply to the state legislature.
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