The town owns a golf course, and it just gave a creek back

Enumclaw owns an 18-hole golf course. Most residents know that the way they know the city owns the water: vaguely, and without any sense that it was ever a decision.

It was several decisions, spread over eighty years, and the most recent one was to take six tenths of a mile of the course away from the golfers and hand it to the fish.

Built on a creek

The course at 45220 288th Avenue Southeast, just off Highway 410, was laid out in the 1940s. Golf databases give the opening as 1947 and credit a designer named Dave Salisbury, though at least one puts it at 1930, and none of them show their work. What is not in dispute, because the state's salmon recovery records say so, is what the builders did with the water. Boise Creek ran through the site, and they moved it.

That was how it was done then. A creek across a fairway is a hazard, and a hazard can be rerouted. Boise Creek, it turned out, was also a spawning stream for spring Chinook, steelhead, coho, pink and fall Chinook, and for the next seventy years the salmon and the golfers shared a channel that had been dug for the convenience of one of them.

A county course

For most of its life the course was King County's. In February 1968 the county's Forward Thrust parks bond put $221,000 into it, one line in a measure that this site's piece on the aquatic center walks through in full.

In 2003 or 2004, depending on which account you read, the county transferred the course to the city. The city, having acquired it, discovered what every small government discovers about golf: it is a business, and cities are not businesses.

Three operators and one bad stretch

The record from there reads like a rental history.

A private manager, Scott Galbraith, ran it from 2005 to 2009. From 2010 to 2012 the city ran it itself, and in the last two of those years lost about $40,000 a year doing so. The city administrator, Chris Searcy, later described that period as a short expedition into running a golf course that was fun, followed by a pause, followed by the word not.

In the good years the course had been the pool's benefactor, clearing enough in 2002 to cover a good part of what the aquatic center lost that year, an arrangement the pool piece on this site sets out in figures. When the golf money thinned after 2008, that ended.

The council weighed two lease proposals in February 2013. Swiftwater Golf, run by Bob Gelinas, a PGA professional, offered five percent of green fees and cart rentals and $50,000 in improvements. A local physical therapist, Peter Erickson, offered a dollar for the first year and a sliding percentage after. Swiftwater took over in March 2013 and held the lease through December 31, 2019.

A new operator took the keys on January 1, 2020: J&H Golf, formed by two local business partners, Bill Jensen and Steve Hodgman. The terms tell you how the city valued the asset by then: no lease payment at all for three years, in exchange for the operator investing in maintenance and improvements, then seven percent of gross revenue above $300,000. The city committed $168,000 of its own capital for 2020 and agreed to replace equipment, starting with a mower estimated at $48,000. Jensen's stated ambition was to make the course a destination again, the way it had been, in his telling, in the sixties and seventies, when golfers drove an hour to play it.

By 2022 play was up about eight percent on the year before, the pro shop had new paint, the eighteenth green and the practice green had been leveled, there were new tee boxes and about fifty new carts, some of which arrived a year late. Beavers had flooded a couple of holes. A pandemic had closed it. Jensen called it an interesting learning curve.

Then the creek came back

The Puyallup Tribe had studied Boise Creek in 2008 and concluded that the 1940s reroute was one of the things wrong with it. The tribe sponsored the design. Ecology, the state's Salmon Recovery Fund and the legislature paid for the work, about $3 million in all.

Construction began in June 2023 and ran a year and a half. A new channel six tenths of a mile long was dug along the eastern tree line of the course, closer to where the creek had run before anyone owned a putter, and a 900-foot culvert on Chappel Springs was opened to daylight. The city warned during construction that holes 1, 8, 10 and 11 would be unplayable at times. On October 8, 2024, the mayor cut a ribbon on a riverbed.

Russ Ladley, the tribe's fisheries director, put the case for the project in one sentence: keeping the golfing public away from the water would by itself improve its quality, and the fish were going to be very happy. Jensen, who had just watched a chunk of his course become a salmon stream, said golfers were coming back and telling him how much they loved it.

Why a town should care which of its assets has fish in it

Because the list of things Enumclaw owns is longer and stranger than most residents think, and the golf course is the one that connects the others.

It sits beside the field house and the stadium the WPA built. Its well is one of the four sources on the city's drinking water report. Its profits once paid for the pool, and its losses once came out of the same fund as the streets. And now it is the site of a $3 million salmon project, on a creek this site's own piece about Boise Creek called the best fish story in the valley.

A city that owns a golf course owns a business it is bad at, a park it cannot afford to close, and, as of two Octobers ago, a creek it has decided to be good to. That is a lot of policy for 18 holes.

Walk the eastern edge

The course is at 45220 288th Ave SE, 360-825-2827, tee times at golftheclawegc.com. Go after a rain and you will find the new channel, which looks nothing like a golf hazard and everything like a creek. Between hole and water is a strip that used to be fairway. Nobody has asked for it back.