Costa Mesa golf courses expected to open in coming days
It appears that local golfers will soon have more options as they look for tee times.
Costa Mesa is expected to open its golf courses — both Costa Mesa Country Club and Mesa Verde Country Club — on Tuesday or Wednesday, pending review of proposed safety protocols.
Costa Mesa Country Club posted on its website that it will be opening on Wednesday. The course will be walking only, and no walk-up tee times will be issued. It is also emphasized that players should not arrive more than 15 minutes prior to their scheduled tee time.
Payments cannot be made in cash. The driving range and practice areas are to remain closed, and the same applies to food and beverage.
The Orange County Board of Supervisors set some guidelines that allowed golfers to return to some courses last Tuesday, and the Costa Mesa City Council collaborated with its local golf courses to establish safe-play protocols of its own.
The Newport Beach Golf Course reopened on Wednesday. Golfers have been eager to get their first rounds in since stay-at-home orders were issued due to the coronavirus.
“We immediately worked and created a working group between myself and Mayor Pro Tem [John] Stephens to work with the course operators because we own a public course,” Costa Mesa Mayor Katrina Foley said. “We did not have any protocols in place for the public course.
“We worked with Mesa Verde [Country Club]. They did an excellent job of drafting up some really exceptional protocols that have safe play in mind, and we used a lot of those as a guide for our own course.”
Foley iterated that in order to open the city, it must be done little by little. The golf courses fall into the category that Foley referred to as the “low-hanging fruit,” or activities that allow for safety protocols to be put in place that are consistent with social distancing, wearing masks, and do not have a lot of people gathering.
The city has simultaneously considered relaxing restrictions on biking and walking trails, Foley added.
James Righeimer, Gary Monahan, Steve Mensinger and Eric Bever, as well as current Councilmembers Sandy Genis and Allan Mansoor — all former mayors — wrote a strongly-worded letter to city leaders, calling for them to reopen parts of the economy.
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