Special Report: How Trump scored a big tax break for conserving a golf range
By Joseph Tanfani and Jaimi Dowdell
Reuters
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - When Donald Trump bought his seaside golf course in a wealthy Los Angeles suburb in 2002, he vowed to surround it with “some of the most beautiful houses in California. But the 261-acre property on the Palos Verdes Peninsula had a problem.
Geologists working for the city would not clear part of it for home-building because of unstable soil underlying the course, built on a landslide-prone bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean.
The denials infuriated Trump, who lobbied and litigated for eight years in a failed effort to reverse the geologists’ findings and secure development approvals, according to interviews with planners and geologists and a Reuters review of public records and court filings.
In March, in the third round of the Arnold Palmer Invitational at Bay Hill, Bryson DeChambeau tried something no golfer had ever pulled off in a PGA Tour round. The crowd gathering behind the sixth tee anticipated he might go for it, because he’d teased it in practice rounds earlier that week. “Let the big dog eat!” someone yelled. “He’s aiming that way,” another guy said to his friends. And when DeChambeau pulled the driver from his bag, the murmuring gallery roared.
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The sixth hole is a 555-yard par 5, with a hard dogleg around a lake about 280 yards out. Because even the best players in the world don’t hit drives much longer than 300 yards, the only option is to drive the ball straight to set up a long second shot––or to cut a corner over a relatively small sliver of the lake, which still leaves a titanic second shot to the green.
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