Letter to the Editor:

The Silver City money pit, the Silver City golf course also known as the University Course at Scott Park

For the last several years the Silver City golf course was managed by the Silver Fairways company. In February 2016 the company announced that they were broke and would go out of business. The company stated that the reason they were broke was that the number of rounds of golf played at the course dropped from 22,000 to 16,000. The Town was faced with the following options: 1) Abandon the course and let the weeds grow, but there are influential people that want to play golf and the course is thought to be one of the things that draw people to Silver City; 2) The Town could take over the course, but everyone knows the course is a money loser and the taxpayers would not be happy; 3) The Town could use Lodger Tax money to cover the losses of the golf course, but the people who now get Lodger Tax money would not be happy; and 4) Find some other organization that would absorb the loss for the Town.

Enter Western New Mexico University. WNMU took over temporary management of the course on March 1, 2016 , then signed a ten-year lease on July 1, 2016. The terms of the lease are, in a few words, Western runs the golf course, and the associated caf+