In the Galveston Area, the six year fight to save the Friendswood Golf Course neighboring the Sun Meadow subdivision probably just ended.

In a letter sent to residents and city officials Wednesday, Millennium Development offered to sell the golf course, but said it won’t try to save it.

“We’re offering them an opportunity to preserve their green space,” Millennium project manager Brett Nichols said. But Nichols said he’s aware that neither the city nor the residents are likely to buy the property. If no one buys it within the next 90 days, Nichols said the greens that residents fought to keep wouldn’t stay a golf course.

Millennium’s original plans would have put a neighborhood in where the golf course is now, but the plans changed after several resident complaints. Millennium came up with several drafts of what it could do with the site, the most recent one adding some homes but preserving the course and allowing Sun Meadow homes with golf course views to keep them. That plan required setting up a special taxing district for the new homes.

Mayor David Smith said the continuously changing plans upset residents and made him skeptical of Millennium’s intentions. “My problem is there are no plans,” Smith said. “They don’t have one. They just have conceptual drawings … I’ve asked them to come up with solutions, and I’ve yet to hear the answers.”

Nichols declined to specify what plans they had for the land if the golf course didn’t sell. The land the golf course sits on is still zoned for single-family housing and could be developed into a neighborhood without council approval.

The company will still try to develop the 15,000-square-feet Manning Estate along FM 528 as a reception hall, but is abandoning plans to make it a country club facility for the golf course, Millennium President Raymond Tiedje said in the letter.

Smith said he thought the letter was a knee-jerk reaction to city council’s Monday night decision to deny a zoning change for the Manning Estate. He said that the two weren’t related and that the zoning change didn’t guarantee the golf course’s future.

“It’s like a parent-child relationship,” he said. “They’re trying to get someone to say yes and, because we don’t, they’re saying ‘that’s not fair.’” But council member Jim Hill said he thought that, had the zoning request been approved, there still might be hope for the course. Hill worked on the golf course 30 years ago and said he’s always thought it wouldn’t make it. “It’s well-designed, but poorly constructed,” he said. “It has never paid its own way.” Hill said he had hoped the course could be saved, but said he thought Sun Meadow residents were partially to blame.

“There is so much hate toward Millennium that people in Sun Meadow opposed everything they tried to do,” he said. “It cost them their golf course. They didn’t want to work together.”

By Sara McDonald The Daily News