Excerpt from Restoration chapter of “Operationally Speaking”

Within any contract will be a clause about site restoration. Most contracts are written with the intent that your organization has use of the entire site, but are responsible for any wear and tear on the facility beyond what is reasonable.

Reasonable becomes a very important word.

Usually a dated facility map will be provided during the eight to ten months prior to the event outlining the planned areas of disturbance.

The restoration process will become one of the defining moments of your event and how you handle these costs will guide who does business with you in the future.

This restoration needs to be approached in a fair and reasonable fashion. There are obvious areas of restoration, such as temporary roads. The roads will have to be removed and top soil brought in to bring the area back up to grade, ready for seed. But there are things which might fall into gray areas, including the cost for removing trees where the bleachers were to be placed around the greens. If this was not included in the initial contract, it would need to be worked out.

It will be advantageous to both parties to have restoration guidelines spelled out in advance; it will help to alleviate misunderstandings later.

If the corporate villages are placed on tennis courts the courts may need resurfacing and the fence reinstalled. Any asphalt that has broken up due to the set up and tear down of the event will have to be repaired, however, if the asphalt was already cracked and breaking up in places, the event should not be responsible for the entire repair. The surface conditions should be documented in writing and photographically before the installation.

There may be areas of the course where heavy equipment has caused ruts in the ground. These areas need to be smoothed out and reseeded. Fence pipe driven through irrigation pipe during installation would have to be fixed.

All electrical or phone lines that were disconnected to allow the tournament system to be installed would need to be reconnected.

If the corporate tents were constructed on fairways, this would have to be discussed. Normally, you would not be responsible for the dead grass created under these tents by the lack of sunlight for such a long period of time. The club would have realized this was going to happen prior to the signing of the contract for the event. If your event is one which moves every year, the club might send representatives to a prior event to see the magnitude and scope of work involved. This would definitely be advisable so there are no surprises.

There may have been the need to remove trees from certain areas beyond what may have been spelled out in the contract. Replacement trees may need to be purchased in those incidences.

Beyond what has been discussed, there are always things you or the event site will disagree on and which will need to be negotiated to an amicable settlement.

In all probability, the event was a success and the host site will want to host it again so it would behoove both parties to come to some kind of agreement and move on.

This book contains information about what it takes to operate a major event. The information may be applied to any event, as all events contain the same elements. However, you may need to reduce the number of people in different areas for a small event such as security and parking personnel.