Does Wakulla Sands Golf Course “Make Money”? Here’s the Math — and the Question Only You Can Answer

Wakulla Reports | We Read the Fine Print and Hand it to You - FILES LOCATED AT THIS LINK

For years, the claim has come up at BOCC meetings: Wakulla Sands Golf Course makes money. The county’s own books do show a profit.

We pulled the county’s own financial statements and check registers to see how that works. Three fiscal years of Statements of Revenues and Expenditures, plus two years of check-by-check vendor spending. We recomputed every total by hand rather than trusting the summary numbers, and everything the county added up, added up correctly.

So the math isn’t in dispute. What’s worth talking about is what the math is counting, and that’s a question the county’s spreadsheet can’t answer for you. This post lays out both sides and leaves the call to you.

First, what this place is

Wakulla Sands didn’t start life as a county investment in recreation. It started as a wastewater problem, and that history matters for everything below.

In 2021, the county was looking for somewhere to spray treated effluent after an earlier plan, a 107-acre parcel on porous karst limestone near Wakulla Springs, drew heavy public opposition. Around 200 residents turned out to protest after a hydrologist warned it could send contaminants toward the aquifer that feeds the Springs. The county was already spraying up to 200,000 gallons a day on the Wildwood Country Club golf course under a contract with its private owner. In October 2021, commissioners voted to buy the course outright. WCTV reported the price: “about $1.4 million.” The goal was to take 600,000 gallons a day. County Administrator David Edwards said of that figure: “That suits it today, we have to have more going forward.”

The course was rebuilt and reopened to the public in August 2024 as Wakulla Sands Golf Club. At the reopening, Commissioner Ralph Thomas told WCTV: “So we created this facility that is primarily an aquifer recharge site, and secondarily is a golf course.” The same report said the site takes “more than one million gallons of wastewater produced by the county each day,” held in a six-million-gallon pond used for irrigation. And Thomas added: “The commission made it very clear that… our goal (is) we want the golf course to pay for itself.”

That’s the county’s own framing: a wastewater facility first, a golf course second, with a stated goal of the golf side paying for itself. So, does it?

The two ways to read the same books

Here’s the Golf Course Fund (Fund 011) for the two most recent fiscal periods we have. Both columns come straight from the county’s own statements; the only thing that changes is whether you count one line: Interfund Transfers, which comes from the sewer fund.

Source: FY24-25 and FY25-26 Golf Course Rev/Ex statements, Fund 011. FY25-26 is a partial year; about a month remained to be counted when the report was pulled.

So with the transfer counted, the fund shows a profit both years. Without it, golf on its own cleared about $13,000 on nearly $2 million of activity in FY24-25, and is running about $72,000 in the red so far in FY25-26. In plain terms: if not for the transfer, the golf course makes very little, if any, money.

What the transfer is

Here’s how we understand it. The transfer is not a bailout. The golf course is the county’s spray field: treated wastewater goes onto the turf instead of the sewer system having to dispose of it some other way, and the golf course gets irrigation water it would otherwise have to supply itself. Each side saves money. The two funds split the difference, using what it would cost each of them to handle the water without the other.

The golf course’s own books back up that the two operations are tied together: every year, the Greens Maintenance budget carries a line called “WWTP Chemicals” , $126,962.32 in FY23-24, $129,452.84 in FY24-25 and $129,758.37 so far in FY25-26. A golf course doesn’t normally need wastewater-treatment-plant chemicals.

What we don’t have is the document that sets the formula , an interlocal agreement, rate study or staff memo showing how the transfer amount is calculated and what the avoided disposal cost actually is. Without it, nobody outside county government can check whether $217,000 to $227,000 a year is a fair split. That’s one of the questions at the bottom.

The case that the savings count

Reasonable people read this as income. The county really does avoid a cost. The golf side really does take on a job , receiving and using the water , and gets paid for it in a line printed in plain sight on the statement. If a private landowner took the county’s effluent on his pasture and got a check for it, nobody would say the check wasn’t revenue. And the course exists in its current form largely because of this role, which the commission describes as the primary one.

The case that they don’t

Reasonable people read it the other way. The transfer isn’t money golfers paid; it comes from a different pot of county money, and the savings land on the sewer side. The county also carries the expense and risk of owning, maintaining and upkeeping a golf course that don’t show up in a “profit” line: the purchase price, the rebuild, hurricane exposure, liability, and the administrative time it takes to run it. And a cost-share formula that outsiders can’t see makes the number hard to evaluate as income.

What’s on the other side of the ledger

None of the following appear in the FY24-25 or FY25-26 operating results above, which is why we’re listing them separately. Some are one-time, some may recur, and , more importantly we can’t tell from the documents how much of the construction spending was golf course and how much was wastewater infrastructure, so don’t read these as “the golf course’s bill.”

Add every fund that touched the golf course in FY23-24 and the net is a $2.13 million outflow , the same fiscal year the main Fund 011 statement shows a “profit” of $56,714.40, because that statement nets one huge transfer against one huge construction project. Both numbers are accurate. They’re measuring different things.

A few things worth a question for your civic leaders

These aren’t accusations. They’re spots where the numbers as printed don’t reconcile on their own.

A likely duplicate payment. Two checks, six weeks apart, both for $18,741.77, to the same vendor, both described as pro-shop furniture “with custom white wash finish,” on invoice numbers that differ only by an asterisk. That’s $37,483.54 total, but the county’s financial statement shows only one $18,741.77 charge for that furniture. Our own read is that this was likely a duplicate. A resident has also recently raised questions about other checks in the registers, so it’s worth watching whether this is one instance or a pattern.

A budget line that collected almost nothing. FY24-25’s adopted budget set aside $713,000 for cart rental revenue, more than a third of the entire fund. Actual collections on that line: $3.77. It may be a category-mapping error (cart revenue may be bundled into green fees); either way, it’s worth asking how closely budget lines are reviewed before adoption.

A truck bought against a different line. In FY25-26, the county spent $50,692 on a new Ford pickup for the course, charged to a category with no money appropriated for equipment, while $15,000 budgeted for landscaping supplies went unspent. Florida Statute Chapter 129 generally requires a board-approved amendment for that. The documents don’t show whether one happened.

Payroll. On-course staff, grounds, pro shop, food and beverage, are paid out of the golf fund itself: $1,168,096.40 in FY24-25 and $1,089,028.93 so far in FY25-26, mostly hourly wages. We found no outside management company. We did find a $450 correction booked to the General Fund instead of the golf fund, which shows cross-fund coding does happen. Whether larger overhead costs sit outside the golf fund is unknown. The county’s public BOCC payroll summary may cover golf staff; we haven’t yet matched it to these department codes. A new “Executive Salaries” line appears for the first time in FY25-26 ($843.04, with $0 budgeted), and we don’t know who holds that position.

You decide

We’re not saying the sewer-fund payment is improper, on what we can see, it looks like a payment for a real service.

Here is what we are saying. Without the transfer, the golf course makes very little, if any, money. With it, the county’s books show a profit. Whether that saving counts as “making money” depends on what you think the golf course is: a business that has to stand on its own, or one part of a wastewater system that happens to have a pro shop. Reasonable people land in different places, and you may weigh the ownership costs and risks differently than we do.

A few questions that may help you decide:

• What document sets the cost-share formula, and what is the avoided disposal cost it’s based on?

• How was the FY23-24 capital project split between golf and wastewater?

• How much of the Hurricane Helene spending does the county expect FEMA to cover?

• Was the furniture invoice paid twice, and did the truck purchase go through a budget amendment?

• Who is on the golf course payroll, once the BOCC payroll summary is matched to golf department codes?

We’d encourage you to ask them too, the next time this comes up at a commission meeting.

Methodology: figures are drawn from the county’s own Statements of Revenues and Expenditures for FY23-24, FY24-25 and FY25-26 (partial year, through 8/28/26) and BOCC Check/Voucher Registers by Vendor for FY2025 and FY2026, all provided to Wakulla Reports directly. Every total was independently recomputed from the underlying line items rather than taken from the documents’ own subtotals. The wastewater and spray-field history, and all quotations, come from public reporting by WCTV (4/20/2021, 10/19/2021 and 8/27/2024) and the Florida Phoenix (7/15/2021). The description of the transfer as a cost-share between the sewer and golf funds reflects Wakulla Reports’ own understanding; we have not seen the document that sets the formula. A fuller line-by-line breakdown, with page and check citations for every figure above, is available on request.

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