AMHERST — Creating a dedicated municipal position to oversee Cherry Hill Golf Course and establishing a Friends of Cherry Hill group are among recommendations an ad hoc committee is making for improving the North Amherst site.

The Cherry Hill Working Group recently finalized four recommendations that will be delivered to Town Manager Paul Bockelman that would mean having professional management for the 91-acre site and treating the golf course operation like a business and a revenue-generating operation.

The recommendations, approved in a 5-0 vote on June 16, are seen as ensuring the long-term viability of the Montague Road site, but would likely mean taking responsibility for the golf course away from the town’s Recreation Department, though the working group was not in favor of having an outside management company run the nine-hole course.

Working group member Ryan Diplock said that a concern is that it’s asking too much to have Rey Harp, as the town’s full-time recreation director, also be running a golf course.

“It doesn’t make sense for us to run a golf course like this from a management perspective,” Diplock said.

Fellow working group member Hilary Matheson said Cherry Hill should be viewed as business and an enterprise, with an enterprise fund, adding that the course will need to be improved before prices can be raised.

“It is a huge asset for the town, and I think we all need to bear this in mind,” Matheson said.

A dedicated staff positon with responsibility for Cherry Hill’s management, operations, planning and stewardship, should be situated within the town’s finance department, ensuring that it can be treated more as an enterprise with potential for bringing in revenue.

For Michele Miller, a former member of the Town Council who chairs the working group, funding for improving Cherry Hill would pay off in the long term.

“I feel very strongly the town needs to deal with the underinvestment that we’re now dealing with here,” Miller said. “They need to make an investment in this golf course at the same time we change the management system.”

A Friends of Cherry Hill group and an internal advisory group to provide input to Town Hall are also essential to have in place.

The recommendations come about a year after the working group was formed “to determine if golf operations can/should continue to be provided by the town and to determine if the operations of golfing at Cherry Hill can be and should be self-supporting.”

The town bought the golf course, designed by Dave Maxson and opening in 1963 as a private enterprise, and its surroundings for $2.2 million in 1987, preventing a private housing development. During the nearly 40 years of town owership, it typically has run a deficit, with revenues from memberships and those coming for daily rounds of golf, usually falling short of the personnel and operating expenses.

Bockelman said he has not yet received the final report.

Harp has attended the working group’s meetings and pushed for its creation, even though he understood that would expose weaknesses. But he said this work would also demonstrate the urgency of a new way to run the golf course.