SCGA Public Affairs

Update: COVID-19 Update

Friday, December 11, 2020

Late this afternoon Los Angeles County Public Health reconsidered the language governing “individual” golf under the terms of the State “Stay at Home” order and that County’s separate “Safer at Home” overlay.


Per that reconsideration, Los Angeles County Parks & Recreation has informed the operators of its 20 municipally owned golf courses that “tee times are limited to no more than 4 players who need not be from the same household. Additionally, both group and private golf instruction are permitted based on the required protocols.”

Those “required protocols” and the protocols governing all else about golf in Los Angeles County, both public and private, under the terms of all extant health orders are contained in the last revision of Los Angeles County’s “Re-opening Golf Courses” order (December 2). We provided it in our last Update, but you can click here to access it again.

We would be remiss (or more accurately, colossally ungrateful) were we not to publicly acknowledge just how hard Los Angeles County Parks & Recreation worked to persuade Public Health of the need to craft language capable of effectuating every safety component of the state stay at home order in a manner consistent with how golf is actually played in the wide open spaces of its 100 plus acres. A big “thank you” on behalf of not just the golfers of Los Angeles County, but the golfers of Southern California’s other 9 counties as well. From the start of the pandemic Los Angeles County, mostly due to its sheer size, has been the most cautious and dilatory among the counties. What it has just done will reverberate with the others in ways that can only inure to golfers’ benefit as we slog through some very difficult days.

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We have been collecting information from around the Southland about the ways in which different jurisdictions and golf facilities have navigated the opaque language contained in the state as well as various county golf health orders in an effort to discern some sort of consensus or set of best practices. We will share that with you next week as part of a greater report that shares information about some of the other pressing public policy concerns we’re looking at as we finish 2020 and get ready to tackle 2021.

But for today – let’s soak in the good news from the state’s largest county.

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