Less Time for Building Golf Courses

In order to be constructed, golf courses need to obtain 700 licenses or approvals by public agencies, but that is no longer required.

The Ministry of Culture and Tourism (MCT) on September 22 announced the “Initiative to Ease Restrictions on Golf Courses,” which included lifting the limit on land area for golf clubs, reducing the number of traffic impact assessments, simplifying the paperwork, and curtailing consultation procedures between related agencies.

This measure aims to respond to the increasing demand for tourism and leisure following the introduction of the five-day workweek, and to absorb the soaring demand for golfing trips overseas.

First of all, the government will repeal the uniformly-applied land area rule (1.08 million m2 for an 18-hole course) to allow developers to create a course well-suited to the natural terrain. The restrictions on land area for clubhouses (3300 m2 for an 18-hole course) and course lengths will also be removed.

In addition, the business plans that had to be first submitted to relevant mayors or governors and passed on to provincial governors will be directly sent to provincial governors, thus greatly reducing the time required for paperwork.

In line with this, the government also abolished the consultative system within city and county councils in pursuing urban management and planning, and only golf courses with more than 18 holes are subject to traffic impact assessments. Also, the 29 documents to which the related license and approvals bodies have direct access are no longer required

However, taking into consideration the civic groups’ opinion that golf courses are the main culprit of environment degradation, the government is planning to further strengthen the supervision of environments in golf courses such as identifying the cases of agricultural chemical abuses.

The MCT said that with this new initiative, the time required for administrative works on golf course construction is expected to reduce to one to two years on average from the previous three to four years, and the construction cost to fall to 3.7 billion won per site.

Young-Sik Ahn ysahn@donga.com