The friends of Beaver Meadow Golf Course and its harshest critics can agree on one thing: In most places, golf is a sport that keeps its door shut to many people.

Kids playing on their own, a golfer wearing cargo shorts and work boots, a beginner who needs a few extra strokes to make it to the green can all draw raised eyebrows or quiet scoffs on many golf courses.

Jim Cilley — a Belmont resident who grew up playing at Beaver Meadow and won the state amateur title in 2011 — knows courses like that. He’s played at them and been a member at some.

But to Cilley, Beaver Meadow is different. It embodies the community and life lessons that golf has to offer, and he wants to show that to people who are skeptical about the the city-owned course’s potential new clubhouse.

“People have the perception of golf, of what the stuffy, 1980s PGA Tour looked like. They don’t understand that Tiger Woods changed golf, introduced so many to the game,” Cilley said. “We’re trying to bring people that aren’t normally golfers here to be exposed to the golf course… and see what Beaver Meadow is all about.”

Cilley led a dozen other people, a majority of whom live in Concord, to form “Friends of the Beav,” a non-profit whose mission involves supporting the course, being ambassadors for municipal golf and creating more opportunities for “individuals of all ages, abilities, and backgrounds” to find enjoyment at Beaver Meadow.

They view a new clubhouse — which would expand social spaces at the club, enlarge the pro-shop, add more golf simulators and add a gear room for cross country skiers in the winter — as an extension of that mission. They’ve promised to raise $250,000 over the next decade to help pay for it.

With its youth clubs and junior memberships, separate leagues for beginners, comparatively affordable rates and welcoming culture, Cilley and others say Beaver Meadow is a doorway into the sport of golf for many who might otherwise be left out. Building a new clubhouse, members of the group said, is not only necessary to fix the basic functionality of the current one, such as problematic plumbing, but would support more golf-related and other events to further widen that doorway.

Friends of the Beav formed in January, spurred by opposition from some residents to the clubhouse plan recommended by city committees over the last 18 months, which would involve an $8 million rebuild at taxpayers’ expense. To them, those who have spoken out against it — writing letters to the city council, making posts online and filing an ethics complaint — are a loud and misinformed minority who don’t understand what Beaver Meadow has to offer and the community it creates.

“It started with the clubhouse, but there’s been a lot of negativity just in general about Beaver Meadow,” Cilley said. “We thought, no, we’ve got to showcase what this place really is and what kind of an asset it is to the city. The facility offers more than just golf, and that’s the part that people are kind of short-sighted about.”

Last week, the city manager proposed a new, $5.9 million design for a new building. His layout would scale up from what’s in the current building, but is smaller than the design favored by city leaders so far. Aspell also has said that the finances would be adjusted under this plan so that course revenue, not taxpayers, pay most of the cost of the building, but he declined to share information with the Monitor about that financial arrangement beyond his verbal comments to the City Council last week.

City staff will discuss all of the city projects that would move forward in the coming year at a budget workshop Thursday night in council chambers. Public comment will follow.

Friends of the Beav was confident that a majority of people supported the larger rebuilding plan before this announcement. The scaled back one, members of the board said, should please everyone.

“The naysayers should be happy now,” Cilley said, “And if they’re not, realistically, they just don’t like golf.”

Nancy Mellitt, a member of Friends of the Beav’s board of directors, praised that Aspell’s proposal checked the boxes of Beaver Meadow’s needs while leaving space to add its wants in the future.

“It really is a win-win for everybody,” she said.

It’s hard to know what most Concord residents think about any of the recent clubhouse plans.

The last public hearing at a City Council meeting about the project was in December 2023. At that time, opposition was so strong that the council sent designs back to the drawing board. The $8 million design, about two-thirds the size of the old one and, excluding the parking lot, less than 15% lower in price, is what came out after 18 months of work. Aspell’s proposal is more of a middle ground between those who say the clubhouse must be replaced and those who don’t believe the general public should have to pay for it, but it hasn’t been reviewed by city committees or in depth by the City Council.

“You’re always going to get pushback with any big ticket item,” said Matt Delois, who grew up in Concord playing at the Beav and is now a professional in the indoor golf industry. “At some point, buildings need to be replaced.”

Concord has a lot of buildings that need to be replaced or renovated, though; it’s not just about the clubhouse.

Homeowners in Concord watching their tax bills climb have said that the approaching wave of local project expenses, including a police station, middle school, field complex, City Hall renovations, wastewater treatment repair and a library, all within five years, has made living in the city unaffordable. And for people with tight budgets or fixed incomes, more money spent on housing means less in their pocket for recreation, like golf.

Under his new proposal, the city manager has said that course revenue and reserves alongside the donations and money from the city’s recreation reserves will mean no initial cost to tax bills for the rebuild, and only a few dollars a year after that. Notably, though, the debt would still be borrowed by the city as a whole and reimbursed by the course. If Beaver Meadow is unable to make the payments, or if a different city council changes its mind about how the building should be paid for, there’s no guarantee that the cost wouldn’t fall back to taxpayers.

The larger, $8 million clubhouse proposal, for reference, would add $33.98 onto the bill of a $400,000 home in the first year, according to the most recent estimate out of City Hall. That’s around eight cents to the tax rate, before other increases.

The fact that Beaver Meadow requires a fee or membership to use is what sets it apart from most other city amenities. Friends of the Beav board members noted that those fees mean the course largely covers its own day-to-day costs, acknowledging that a golf course is a different type of city facility than, say, a library. It’s one that can’t exist for free.

By pursuing a forward-looking and multi-purpose space, Friends of the Beav said, the new clubhouse will bring in more money directly into city coffers and, over time, support growth of the city tax base.

“This clubhouse we’re considering building now has got to be able to grow and evolve with the type of business we’re looking to bring in as a community, as a golf course, and a supporting part of the community itself,” said Charles Randall, whose family built their house near Beaver Meadow to be close to it.

Mark Coen, another board member, has seen Concord rally around projects that make it a better city, from new elementary schools to an overhaul of Main Street, to the Capital Center for the Arts. He said that even people who opposed those things at first eventually came around when they saw the finished product.

“That’s one of the big reasons I really fell in love with Concord, because people came together for the whole good,” Coen said.

The socio-economic framing of opposition to the clubhouse caught him off guard. “Now is the first time, me living in Concord, that I’ve had anything so divisive come up about a leisure sport in this city,” he said. It became “a lightning rod” that made him doubt that community rallying effect.

At one point, a city councilor vocally against the project wondered why, if the Beav had such a strong community, it didn’t have a non-profit supporting it financially, as some parks and the city library do.

“I said, ‘That’s a very good point,’” Coen said. “So we have one now.”

Catherine McLaughlin can be reached at cmclaughlin@cmonitor.com. You can subscribe to her Concord newsletter The City Beat at concordmonitor.com.