Homeowners got fed up with ratty-looking golf course in their backyards — so they sued

Residents of the Keys Gate community in Homestead have been waiting for years to find out what will become of the abandoned, decaying golf course in their backyards.

Wayne Rosen, an influential South Dade developer, bought the course in 2014, quickly shut it down and stopped maintaining it, saying it wasn’t getting enough use. Since then, he has floated numerous proposals to restore the course or otherwise make use of the land, but the proposals had strings attached and nothing has panned out.

The residents are fed up. Now, some of them are taking Rosen to court.

On Dec. 20, the Augusta Greens Condominium Association — one of more than a dozen communities within Keys Gate — filed a lawsuit against two of Rosen’s companies that own the Keys Gate Golf & Country Club. The complaint says the companies have violated a covenant in county records that lays out, in detail, the owner’s responsibility to maintain the course.

“You’ve got such a grand place here that can be an icon,” Morris Henry, the president of the association, told the Miami Herald. Instead, Henry said, Rosen has determined the fate of the course for a community of 4,000 people. “It’s unbelievable that you can let one man do that,” Henry said.

Among the requirements laid out in the covenant: Grooming the greens, maintaining tees to “playability and industry standards,” and daily removal of litter.

A recent visit to the course reveals that those standards aren’t being met: Greens have disappeared, parts of the course are covered in trash, and structures once used as bathrooms are crumbling and filled with debris. The course’s clubhouse has shattered windows with old furniture and graffiti inside.

“Defendants’ multiple violations of the Covenant have caused an accumulation of unwanted litter and debris, have allowed for exotic and invasive species to take refuge on the Golf Course and the Clubhouse, and have encouraged crimes such as the illegal discharge of firearms, burglaries and attempted burglaries, etc.,” the complaint says.

Over the past few years, the course became a popular spot for young people riding all-terrain vehicles and shooting firearms, though residents and Homestead police say the issue has been stemmed by increased patrols and boulders blocking off access.

In 2017, a 10-foot, 6-inch python was captured at the edge of the course.

But Rosen told the Herald the lawsuit is “frivolous.” He said that the course is mowed “nonstop” in compliance with city code enforcement — which residents confirm to be true — and said the condo association has no standing to sue him over the covenant in question.

In fact, Rosen said, the covenant has “nothing to do” with his property. He said a description of the property’s geographic location “does not describe my golf course,” even though the document refers to the property as the Keys Gate Golf Club.

“Augusta Greens and everybody else knows that it’s not part of my title policy,” said Rosen, adding that a page seems to be missing from the legal description of the course. “I called the title company and they said it’s not my property.”

Rosen also said that even if the covenant is deemed valid, a clause in the document gives him the power to dissolve it at any time.

“We’re going to do the [paperwork] and get rid of it,” Rosen said.

After that, he said, he will file a motion for summary judgment and win the case. Rosen also hinted at a potential counter-suit, saying he would “decide whether I want to go after that association or not.”

Members of the Augusta Greens association said Rosen may have the power to change the covenant through a vote of the broader Keys Gate Community Association, which oversees the entire Keys Gate community, but not to dissolve the covenant altogether.

The residents’ lawsuit comes after years of failed negotiations to fix up the course.

In 2015, Rosen asked the city to award him $3.5 million in federal Community Development Block Grants — typically allotted to benefit low-income communities and to eliminate blight — to put toward the course’s renovation.

He quickly backed off that request after criticism, saying he would instead keep the golf course closed and let it go brown.

In 2016, Rosen told Homestead officials he would pay a well-known golf course designer $12 million of his own money to revamp the course, on one condition: the city first needed to approve his requested zoning variances for single-family homes near the Homestead-Miami Speedway.

But the golf course continued to languish after the City Council approved townhouses instead of the single-family homes Rosen wanted. Rosen said that only the single-family units would bring in the money he needed to fund the course.

In 2017, Rosen called on the city to apply for a $10 million economic development grant from Miami-Dade County, a proposal that included converting the course’s clubhouse into a convention center. The city applied, but the county denied it.

More recently, Keys Gate residents say Rosen suggested that if they supported an appeal to the City Council for 770 new units in the community, he would renovate the golf course and clubhouse.

In a February letter to the Homestead city manager, the land trust that owns the property where the 770 units were proposed indicated that once the land was sold to the construction company Lennar, the trust would loan Wayne Rosen and his brother Drew — a co-owner of the golf course — up to $5 million to renovate the course.

The discussions included a potential deal for Rosen to refurbish the clubhouse and build a new nine-hole course on the front nine, while allowing Rosen to sell the other half of the course to Lennar to build more homes on the back nine.

But residents say that at an Oct. 17 meeting, Rosen told them he was not going to reopen the golf course after all.

“Wayne Rosen will not refurbish/open the golf course as he promised,” an anonymous Keys Gate resident wrote in a letter distributed around the community on Oct. 20. “Once again, the residents were used.”

Rosen told the Herald he backed away from the deal because two communities within Keys Gate had filed appeals of his 770-unit project in violation of the terms they agreed upon. Rosen and the groups later reached a settlement, he said.

“Any arrangement that I commit to is always subject to no appeal,” Rosen said.

Steve Losner, who was elected as mayor of Homestead in November, told the Herald that Keys Gate residents had been “lied to.”

“There is a huge element of mistrust,” Losner said, adding that city officials in the past have gone too easy on Rosen, a major donor to local politicians.

“Under the prior administration in Homestead, it seems to have been hands off,” Losner said. If anyone other than Rosen owned the property, the mayor said, “code enforcement would be all over him.”

A spokesman for Homestead police, Sgt. Fernando Morales, told the Herald there were three code enforcement actions at the golf course in 2019, two related to spreading fill without a permit and one for overgrown grass. But he said there haven’t been any issues since August and that the course’s owners have helped police monitor trespassing.

Police arrested several people for trespassing two years ago and have instructed ATV riders to stay to the south of the course, Morales said.

Rosen said he has recently told homeowners that, rather than reviving nine holes of the golf course, he is willing to donate that part of the course to the Keys Gate Community Association and dedicate it as open space, possibly for a park. He said that’s what a group of Keys Gate residents asked for at the meeting in October.

“We will put in writing that we will not be able to build in the area,” Rosen told the Herald.

But homeowners are skeptical of that plan, in part because they say Rosen has influence over the community association. The association’s board consists of three members of the trust that owns land around the course. Rosen is the trust’s largest shareholder, according to Keys Gate residents.

“He controls the association,” said Losner.

The proposal to designate half of the course as open space “may sound good, but it’s not really anything substantive,” the mayor said.

Rosen acknowledged that he’s a shareholder in the land trust but declined to disclose how much he owns.

Losner said that in the coming months, Rosen is likely to come before the City Council seeking new variances on property in the Keys Gate community. The mayor said he hopes the council will use that leverage to try to resolve the golf course debacle once and for all.

“[That is] his last bite at the apple, as well as ours, to have a global resolution of all those issues,” Losner said. “When the developer comes to us asking for favors, and this is our last opportunity to help homeowners, I’m gonna need to know that all of the outstanding issues have been resolved.”

Told of those comments, Rosen suggested the mayor can’t let the dispute over the golf course influence his vote on something else.

“Legally, he can’t,” Rosen said. “You’ve got to vote on the issue in front of you.”