Austin could gain ownership of Muny golf course under proposed UT land deal

Austin is close to an agreement with the University of Texas at Austin (UT) that would transfer ownership of the 141-acre Lions Municipal Golf Course, known as Muny, to the city and set development rules for about 190 acres of surrounding university land in West Austin.

Austin City Council is scheduled to consider the deal Nov. 19. 

Today, UT owns the land, and the city operates the course under a lease, paying the university about $500,000 a year as of 2020. That lease expired in 2019 and has rolled month to month since, with either side able to end it with five months’ notice. 

The anticipated proposal could end a debate over Muny’s future that has run for more than half a century. UT first tried to cancel the city’s lease in 1972, sparking the original Save Muny campaign. The fight resurfaced with nearly every lease renewal and planning effort since, including university master plans in 2009 that would have closed the course. Along the way, the two sides weighed a city purchase, land swaps, bond funding and a special taxing district. 

The latest agreement would transfer the course through amendments to the 1989 Brackenridge Development Agreement (BDA), which governs how UT may develop its land on either side of Lake Austin Boulevard. Because the land was donated to UT in 1910 for the university’s benefit, UT has a duty to earn value from it. Anonymous donors who came forward in recent months have proposed a large gift to UT to fill that gap. In exchange, UT would donate the course to the city, which must keep it an 18-hole golf course in perpetuity or see it revert to UT. 

Neither the donors nor the size of their gift has been disclosed, though Mayor Kirk Watson described it as a very large amount of money. For scale, the 155 acres holding Muny and the adjacent West Austin Youth Association (WAYA) campus are appraised at more than $680 million, up from about $205 million in 2019. That year, UT was asking $109.5 million for the course, and the Muny Conservancy, co-chaired by Scotty Sayers and two-time Masters champion Ben Crenshaw, had raised more than $20 million toward a purchase. 

WAYA would receive the deed to the roughly 13 acres its youth sports complex occupies on the course’s eastern edge. A final agreement also requires approval from the UT System board of regents. 

UT would keep ownership of the remaining 190 acres of the Brackenridge Tract, which are separate from the course and lie largely west of Lake Austin Boulevard. According to the Houston Chronicle, the university would be free to develop about 150 of those acres for retail and housing. The tract also holds UT student housing, the Brackenridge Field Laboratory and existing commercial sites. 

No developers have been named, and UT has not said whether it would sell or lease parcels. The university already leases some land for retail along Exposition Boulevard. A regulating plan would cap building heights at 65 feet as viewed from Lake Austin Boulevard, limit impervious cover to 75 percent sitewide and require a 200-foot setback from Lady Bird Lake. 

The amended BDA would also lay out a process for updating UT’s lease of property at Mueller, exchanging city rights-of-way and creating a Tax Increment Reinvestment Zone (TIRZ). The TIRZ would set aside future growth in property tax revenue within the zone to pay for improvements there. 

City staff will brief the Environmental Commission and the Planning Commission in October. If council approves the amendments in November, staff will draft the TIRZ and regulating plan and return to both commissions in early 2027, with council consideration expected that spring. Contracting tied to the TIRZ and the tract’s development is unlikely to move before then. 

Philanthropist and longtime UT regent George W. Brackenridge donated about 500 acres along the Colorado River to the university in 1910. The Austin Lions Club leased part of that land for a golf course in 1924, and UT regents approved transferring the lease to the city in 1937 for $1 a year. 

In 1950, Muny became the first public golf course in the South to desegregate. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2016 and is now the city’s busiest public course, with about 75,000 rounds played each year. 

In 2008, Austin City Council passed a resolution supporting Muny as a permanent facility, months after regents hired a firm to plan the tract’s redevelopment. Regents voted in 2011 to let the city’s lease expire in 2019. 

Austin is not the first Texas city to lean on private dollars to preserve a historic municipal course. In Houston, the Astros Golf Foundation funded a $34 million golf and tennis project at city-owned Memorial Park, including a course redesign by architect Tom Doak, a clubhouse, a maintenance facility and a stormwater irrigation system. The course is now home to the PGA Tour’s Houston Open. 

San Antonio’s Brackenridge Park Golf Course sits in a park created from land that the same George W. Brackenridge donated to that city. Opened in 1916, it is the oldest 18-hole public course in Texas. A $4.5 million renovation in 2008 restored its original routing, and it is now one of six municipal courses managed by the nonprofit Alamo City Golf Trail. 

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