If you've tried to book a weekend morning at a Los Angeles or San Diego municipal course in the last few years, you know the feeling: the tee sheet opens, and seconds later it's gone. For a lot of those times, the culprit wasn't other golfers — it was brokers. As of this weekend, that business is against the law in California.
Gov. Gavin Newsom on Sunday, Sept. 27, signed Assembly Bill 1954, known as the "PAR" Act (Protecting Access to Reservations). The law bars third-party platforms from listing, advertising, promoting, selling or transferring tee times at publicly owned golf courses without a written agreement from the course operator. The bill was authored by Assemblymember Chris Ward (D-San Diego) and sponsored by the California Alliance for Golf, the statewide advocacy coalition managed by the Southern California Golf Association.
"Public golf courses belong to the public," Ward said in a statement after the signing.
How the brokering racket worked
California's municipal courses — more than 220 of them, owned by cities, counties, charter cities and the state — are intentionally priced below market as part of public park systems. That keeps golf affordable for residents, seniors, juniors and high school teams. It also creates a gap between what a tee time costs and what a desperate golfer will pay for it, and in the urban muni systems of Southern California, brokers moved into that gap.
The scheme was simple: book prime tee times in bulk the moment they were released, then resell them through social media and messaging apps for a booking fee — reportedly as much as $40 per time, on top of the green fee. The practice became a public scandal in 2024 after golf content creator Dave Fink documented the broker network for his audience, and the L.A. Department of Recreation and Parks opened an investigation.
In September 2025, federal prosecutors took it further, indicting twin brothers from Los Angeles for failing to report roughly $1.1 million in income — about $700,000 of which prosecutors said came from reselling tee times at 17 Southern California municipal courses between 2021 and 2023.
Why cities needed a state law
Cities did respond. Los Angeles and others added non-refundable deposits, tighter online verification, no-show forfeitures and bans for repeat abusers. Those measures helped, but they were a game of whack-a-mole, and they often made booking harder for the very locals they were meant to protect.
What municipalities lacked was a legal tool aimed squarely at the brokers themselves. AB 1954 supplies it. A violation is now an unlawful business practice under California's Unfair Competition Law, which carries civil penalties of up to $2,500 per violation and gives course owners and operators a path to seek relief in court. Because the Legislature declared tee time access a matter of statewide concern, the law also applies to charter cities such as Los Angeles and San Diego.
AB 1954 at a glance
- Covers: Golf courses owned by a local public agency, including clubhouses, ranges and other facilities, whether run by the agency or a contracted management company.
- Prohibits: Third-party platforms from listing, advertising, promoting, selling or transferring those tee times without the operator's written authorization.
- Doesn't affect: Booking partners that already have agreements with a course. Authorized platforms can keep operating.
- Carve-out: An individual golfer may pass along a reservation for no more than they paid if the course doesn't clearly post its cancellation policy where the time is booked.
- Enforcement: Civil action under the Unfair Competition Law, brought by public prosecutors or the course owner/operator.
A first for golf advocacy
AB 1954 is the first bill the California Alliance for Golf has sponsored, and the SCGA has framed it as proof that golf's advocacy work can go on offense — solving problems through legislation rather than only fighting off harmful bills. The bill passed both houses and reached the governor's desk in late August, and Newsom signed it as part of a package of consumer-protection measures that also cracked down on unauthorized resale of restaurant reservations.
The law doesn't touch private clubs, resorts or daily-fee courses that aren't publicly owned, and it won't create more tee times at crowded munis. But it removes the middleman from the most in-demand public tee sheets in the country — and it gives other states a model if brokering shows up in their muni systems next.
For California's public-course golfers, the fix is straightforward: book directly with the course or its authorized partner, and treat anyone offering to sell you a municipal tee time on the side as what the state now says they are — operating illegally.
