Elderly members of Port Royal Golf Club may not have to pay a $3,000 initiation fee when the revamped course reopens in 2009, Premier Ewart Brown has revealed.

He was asked at a public meeting whether the introduction of the one-off payment on top of annual subs by Port Royal's board of trustees was going to price many seniors out of playing there. Dr. Brown replied: "Not on my watch; it won't happen."

He said the $3,000 fee, calculated for a member playing twice a week, worked out at about $52 per round. "I was told that many of the seniors are people who can afford those rates and more but we have instructed them to cut back and reduce and to take away the initiation fee past a certain point if the person has been a member for a certain period of time," he said.

Dr. Brown said Government was not going to spend $13.4 million on transforming the course only to have locals unable to play there.

"Bermudians will pay 30 percent less than visitors and seniors will get a discount on top of that," he said of fees for non-members. "I think it's going to work out to be pretty reasonable. We'll see how it goes."

The introduction of the initiation fee has angered some members of Port Royal Golf Club, who will have to pay the $3,000 on top of their yearly subs of $3,500. The Royal Gazette reported last week on an e-mail to trustees describing increases at the club as unreasonable.

Port Royal will be the venue for the PGA Grand Slam in 2009 and 2010, moving from the Mid Ocean Club, where it has been staged for the past two years.

"The objective is not to get rid of the seniors to get the PGA," Dr. Brown told the meeting last Wednesday, adding that if Bermudians want top-drawer facilities, they have to be prepared to pay something.

"Everything is not going to be free and golf is one of them," he said. "We are going to have to pay to keep these things going. The cost will not be prohibitive."

Dr. Brown, who is also Tourism Minister, told the PLP meeting in Southampton that $1.5 million of taxpayers' cash was used to fund the PGA and it resulted in $7.5 million worth of exposure for the Island this year.

"When people see pictures of Bermuda on television like that, we think it's a good spend for us," he said.

From next year the Port Royal course will be seen by people in 90 million households worldwide, he said. "We will be able to advertise the course while the tournament is on."

Earlier, Southampton West MP Randy Horton said the revamp was "moving along, making great progress and certainly we are looking forward to the Port Royal Golf Course being in operation early in the year 2009."