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Aerial photo of Keiser’s Now-Withdrawn New River Golf Course Proposal. Courtesy Coos County.
Michael Keiser’s proposed New River golf course south of Bandon is rising for a third time.
Twice now Keiser, through his company Bandon Biota, has applied for a permit to place a golf course on property he owns in the vicinity of Twomile Creek, adjacent to Bandon State Natural Area. The first attempt, about ten years ago, included a purchase of 280 acres of the state park for some 2.5 million. That project ended when it became known that Keiser had hired a local well-drilling company to drill unauthorized boreholes in the state park property which he coveted, but did not own at that stage of the negotiations. Bandon Biota applied to Coos County a second time in 2022 for the golf course, this time without the state park land. Coos County granted the permit, though for a golf course less than half the size Keiser had applied for, and without the golf-related buildings he also sought. Keiser withdrew the application after Oregon Coast Alliance filed an appeal of the planning commission approval.
Bandon Biota has now filed a third application with Coos County. It is not yet available to the public, as the county has not completed its review and has not declared the application complete or incomplete. Nevertheless, Bandon Biota at the same time filed three applications with the Water Resources Department (WRD) to transfer water that it owns on cranberry bogs up to the proposed golf course. The applications make it sound innocent: just a change from irrigation in one place to irrigation in another place. But irrigation of cranberry bogs is not the same as irrigating turf grass — cranberries are much more water-conserving than turf grass is. Water availability is already a longstanding problem for the farmers and rural residences in the area. At the 2022-23 hearings for the golf course, water problems occupied much of the discussion, and Keiser’s water report was criticized for being vague and incomplete. Now his company is seeking water transfers to the proposed golf course with no analysis at all of the likely effects to the neighborhood water picture.
Despite the fact that there is no golf course application to refer to, WRD decided to go ahead with the transfer applications. ORCA argued that it is inappropriate, under its own rules, for WRD to be considering major water transfers when there is nothing known about the project to which they will be transferred. Will it be a 300-acre proposal as last time, or closer to 100 acres, as the planning commission approval granted? Or something else? And what will the golf course configuration be?
ORCA is keeping close watch on the golf course application making its way through administrative review in Coos County, as it will come up for hearings eventually. The same problems that always dogged this proposal will still be there. This area is already tightly settled and farmed, with rural residents, cranberry bogs, other local farming operations and small local roads. A golf course would be a disaster here, bringing in scads of traffic, and using much scarce water. Most of the lands are zoned Exclusive Farm Use, on which golf courses are allowed; but a significant acreage is zoned High Value Farmland, which does not allow golf courses.
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