Puddles and marshy spots are in evidence in this Monday afternoon, May 17, 2021, near the first tee at the Iron Eagle Golf Course in North Platte, Neb. The Newberry Access bridge over the South Platte River, which has flooded the 27-year-old course four times, can be seen at right. The first hole has historically been one of several flood-prone ones at Iron Eagle. (Todd von Kampen/North Platte Telegraph via AP)

Todd Von Kampen

North Platte Telegraph

Chief Industries of Grand Island has exercised its option to buy Iron Eagle Golf Course, closing the sometimes soggy but usually heated 31-year saga of public golf in North Platte.

It will remain closed this year, City Administrator Matthew Kibbon said Monday, while the construction firm upgrades and reconfigures the now privately owned course in light of South Platte River floods that damaged it four times between 1995 and 2015.

Kibbon said the city and Chief subsidiary C&L Land LLC completed the $10,000 sale of the 154-acre course on May 7 — two months after the City Council approved a lease-purchase agreement of up to two years.

The North Platte Telegraph reports the 18-hole Iron Eagle will be folded into Chief’s multimillion-dollar development plan, announced 21 months ago, for sites between and on both sides of North Platte’s two Interstate 80 interchanges.

“I’m excited about the fact that, as a community, we can move on from the golf course discussion,” Mayor Brandon Kelliher said Monday.

“And I’m looking forward to seeing the exciting developments Chief has planned for our area.”

Roger Bullington, Chief’s main project spokesman as president and general manager of Chief Development Inc., was unavailable for comment Monday.

After initially aiming to open Iron Eagle for a shortened season, Kibbon said, Chief decided to rework the course to limit damage should the South Platte flood again.

“They’re really excited about the project and improving the course’s condition,” he said. “And they felt the best way to accomplish that was to keep the course closed for the 2021 season.”

That also led Chief officials to “move ahead with the purchase now” so they could “speak to potential (golfing) clientele” about their plans, Kibbon added.

Iron Eagle opened in June 1994, four years after voters first spoke on whether North Platte should offer residents a city-owned alternative to private courses.

They rejected a May 1990 proposal that would have had the city buy nine-hole Indian Meadows Golf Course, well south of the river, and add nine more holes on city-owned land across South Buffalo Bill Avenue.

Exactly two years later, voters accepted a plan to build Iron Eagle on land donated by the Glenn Chase family. Family members gave the city a “quit-claim” deed in April 2020 to ease a possible sale.

But the long-quiet South Platte inundated several low-lying holes in June 1995, a scenario repeated in subsequent floods in June 1997, September 2013 and May 2015.

Before that sequence, the river — which washed away a highway bridge on June 15, 1921, almost exactly a century ago — hadn’t seen a major flood since six days of rain in North Platte were capped by a still-record 4.11-inch deluge on April 18, 1942.

Iron Eagle never fulfilled backers’ predictions that it would pay for itself. Meanwhile, the repeated floods and repairs inflamed the city’s public debates for a quarter-century, affecting locals’ opinions of other proposed community projects.

Chief, which once owned and operated Indianhead Golf Club in Grand Island, was the sole respondent in October when the city sought parties to buy or lease Iron Eagle.

The council voted 7-1 March 2 to ratify the lease-purchase deal, under which Chief paid a $5,000 fee applicable toward a final sale and assumed leases of Iron Eagle’s golf equipment and driving range.

But the climactic chapter in North Platte’s prolonged public-golf story actually opened in August 2019, when Chief unveiled its three-pronged, $30 million to $40 million development plan between and on both sides of the city’s two Interstate 80 interchanges.

A month later, then-Mayor Dwight Livingston broke into a heated council debate over Iron Eagle to say he had been quietly talking with potential buyers for the course.

Not until Dec. 1, 2020, his last full day before retiring, did Livingston confirm Chief was the possible buyer he had talked with.

When he first unveiled the firm’s larger plan, Bullington said its last and largest component — a 200-unit-plus “senior living” complex just west of Iron Eagle — would benefit from the course’s proximity.

He subsequently said its presence or absence wouldn’t derail Chief’s larger plan, which began with the 2019-20 construction of Iron Trail Industrial Park for warehousing and distribution clients west of the Walmart Distribution Center.

When Chief made its formal proposal to buy or lease Iron Eagle last fall, it left open the possibility of reducing the course from 18 to nine holes or redeveloping it entirely, depending on how it assessed threats from future South Platte floods.

In addition to the senior-living complex — which would cater but not be limited to people 55 and older — Chief plans commercial developments along East Halligan Drive between Iron Eagle and I-80.

Chief officials haven’t indicated when they’ll bring formal plans for the last two phases to the city, Kelliher and Kibbon said.

This story first appeared in The North Platte Telegraph. It was distributed as a member exchange story by The Associated Press.