The Turning Stone Courses

Atunyote has its own gate. The other courses at Turning Stone run off the resort road, past the hotels and the parking, but Atunyote sits three miles away, off Route 31, behind an entrance the scorecard calls the Atunyote Gate. Tom Fazio built it: parkland, small waterfalls, tree-lined fairways, 7,315 yards from the black tees at a rating of 75.8. On a Saturday it costs $275, which makes it the most expensive round in Central New York.

Four courses later, the same owner will sell you 18 holes for $26.

Ninety holes, five golf courses, one landlord, and a spread of more than 10:1 between the top of the price list and the bottom. Those are both 18-hole rates, on courses that both take a booking from anybody who calls. Access does not explain the gap, and neither does the format. The ground under all of them pays no property tax at all.

Ninety holes, and the order they arrived in

Turning Stone opened as a casino in 1993. The Oneida Indian Nation got into golf six years later by adding a pair of nine-hole courses.

In 1999 it bought Pleasant Knolls, a nine-hole course of par 36 sprawled over 70 acres off Stony Brook Road, in Vernon, NY rather than neighboring Verona, NY. Ed Peters laid it out in 1950. Hal Purdy adjusted it in the late 1960s. By the time the Nation took it on, people had been playing it for half a century. In July of that same year it opened Sandstone Hollow, a nine-hole par three of 1,482 yards that Rick Smith was asked to make finishable inside an hour. Those two are still the cheap end of the property. Nine holes costs $19, and because both are nine-hole courses, the $26 rate buys you two laps of the same nine. One price covers card holders, hotel guests, and the public alike, and a junior plays for $10.

Pleasant Knolls' nine-hole USGA rating is 34.2 off the whites with a 102 slope. An old scorecard, still on the resort's own website when it was archived in 2010, carries house rules from another era.

• No children under nine years old allowed on the course
• No walkers or caddies without a ticket
• No fivesomes
• Gentlemen must wear shirts at all times

The two small courses have since converged. In 2005 two laps of Sandstone Hollow cost $25 and two laps of Pleasant Knolls cost $15, which is the order you would expect from a new Rick Smith build against a secondhand nine from 1950. They now charge the same $26. Whatever the architecture was worth then, it commands nothing now. Sandstone Hollow's name has been given to a hotel, which sits in the resort's accommodations list alongside the Lodge, the Tower, the Brook, and the Crescent.

Then the money arrived. Shenendoah opened in May 2000, the resort's first championship 18, designed by Rick Smith again. Kaluhyat, by Robert Trent Jones Jr., followed in August 2003. Atunyote, the Fazio course, opened in July 2004, and both nine-hole courses stayed shut for the whole of the season it was being built.

Atunyote, and what $275 stopped buying

Atunyote's board is one table, and that is the first unusual thing about it.

Source: Turning Stone Resort Casino, posted rates for 18 holes as of September 7, 2026. Cart, practice facility, locker room, bottled water and tees included.

Round	Fri–Sun	Mon–Thu
Public	$275	$250
TS Rewards card, resort guest	$260	$235
Second round, same day	$135	$125

No seasonal rate and no twilight. Kaluhyat and Shenendoah each publish four tiers across two seasons, down to $90 for a twilight round in October. Atunyote publishes a number and you pay it — talk about being the favorite golf-child.

Twenty-five miles away in Utica, NY, the city owns Valley View Golf Course, where 18 holes in 2026 costs $25 walking and $48 with a cart. Same county, same season. The median household income in Oneida County is $73,207 and 17.4% of the people live below the poverty line. Atunyote is not priced for the county it stands in. It is priced for somebody who drove here and likely is expensing the round to their employer.

In 2005, Atunyote's second season, the Nation published a peak rate of $200 for a non-resort guest. That $200 bought the cart, the practice facility, locker room privileges, lunch and refreshments on the course, and a cart stocked with Pro V balls, a repair tool, tees, a towel and a custom yardage book.

The $275 rate includes bottled water. The lunch is gone, so are the refreshments on the course, the golf balls, the repair tool, the towel and the yardage book. What remains is the cart, the range, a locker and a bottle of water.

Same owner, same course, two boards 21 years apart. The number went up by $75 and everything behind it came off, down to a bottle of water and a handful of tees. It is what happens to a price that was never really the product.

Atunyote got onto the PGA Tour because a course 60 miles away went under water. In July 2006 the B.C. Open, played at En-Joie in Endicott, NY since the 1970s, was flooded out. The Tour moved it to Atunyote at six weeks' notice and called it the B.C. Open Presented by Turning Stone. Five weeks after it was played, the commissioner announced that Atunyote would get a Tour event of its own the following September.

That was the Turning Stone Resort Championship, and it ran from 2007 to 2010, latterly opposite a World Golf Championship. It did not come back in 2011 after a dispute over dates. The Notah Begay III Foundation Challenge ran there until 2014. Before any of it, in August 2000, Bill Murray and Phil Mickelson had played an exhibition at Shenendoah, and in 2005 Arnold Palmer and John Daly played a skins game at Atunyote.

The Turning Stone Resort Championship then turned up in an unlikely document. In 2008 the Nation was asking the federal government to take 13,004 acres of its land into trust, which would put that ground permanently beyond the reach of state and local taxes. Objectors argued the transfer would hurt the regional economy. The Department of the Interior's ruling listed the tournament as evidence against them:

"Also, in 2006, the PGA Tour began holding an annual event at the Atunyote golf course at Turning Stone."

So a golf tournament helped argue 13,004 acres off the tax rolls. The ruling came in May 2008. The tournament was gone by 2011. The land is still in trust.

Kaluhyat, priced to the dollar like its neighbor

Kaluhyat is compared to Shenendoah throughout what follows, and not to Atunyote, for a reason. Atunyote is the outlier and everybody knows it. Kaluhyat and Shenendoah are the test, because they are two different golf courses by two different architects and the resort charges exactly the same for both.

Most of the ground at Turning Stone is the gentle stuff of Central New York, and the other courses use it that way. Kaluhyat was routed across the part that moves, with elevation changes the resort measured at 50 feet in places, plateau tees over the valley, and six lakes. Golf Digest put it on America's 100 Greatest Public in 2017. Five sets of tees run from about 5,300 yards to nearly 7,200. Its name comes from the Oneida word for "the other side of the sky."

Its 2026 public rate is $175 on a weekend and $160 midweek, dropping to $140 and $125 after October 4th, with twilight at $120 and a replay at $80.

Shenendoah's board is the same board, in all eight cells across both seasons.

Two architects, two routings, two clubhouses, two award histories, one price list. The only thing that separates them is a column Kaluhyat publishes and Shenendoah does not: an early-season public rate of $125, from opening to May 18th.

A course priced on its architecture would not do that. This is hotel pricing, applied to golf. Rate tiers, day-of-week bands, a shoulder season, and $15 off for anybody already sleeping in the building. It is the same logic that prices a room at the Tower, and the two courses are two room types. Which architect drew the greens is a marketing input, not a pricing one.

The awards say the same thing from the other direction: Golfweek's Top 50 Casino Courses, Casino Player Magazine's best course in New York, and Golf Vacation Insider's Best Golf and Casino Resorts. There is a whole ranking genre for casino golf, with its own trade press, and Turning Stone appears in it every year. The people who rank golf courses for a living have built a separate shelf for this asset class.

Shenendoah, rebuilt by the man who built it

Every hole at Shenendoah is named for something living on it. The 15th is Raccoon Den, and the course page will tell you the raccoons work the pond bank on the left, feeding on largemouth bass, bluegill and small frogs. The 16th is Red Maple, the 17th Whitetail Deer, the 18th Apple Orchard, where herons come for the frogs. One hole carries a note that the snapping turtles between the tees and the green have been known to snap at people, and that a safe distance is suggested.

It is the best writing the Nation has published about any of its golf courses, and it hangs on the one course whose name the Nation never explains. Atunyote's page tells you the word means eagle. Kaluhyat's tells you it means the other side of the sky. Shenendoah's page tells you about the raccoons.

The word means deer. It comes from the Oneida oskanu·tú, and from Skenandoa, the Oneida chief known in English as the Deer, who died in 1816. Every hole on this course is named for an animal, the course itself is named for one, and the Nation has never said so on the page.

Rick Smith opened the course in May 2000, and in 2017 the Nation hired him back to rebuild it. He constructed seven new holes: the 3rd, 4th, 12th, 13th, 14th, 16th and 17th. The resort called the work a reimagining of the layout and reopened for the 2017 season.

Seventeen years is a short life for a golf hole. Courses move bunkers and rebuild greens all the time. Replacing seven holes out of 18 is a second opinion, and the Nation asked for it from the man who gave the first one.

What it cost is not public. The resort called it a multimillion-dollar investment and never put a figure on it. Miles Blundell, the director of golf operations, gave the reason instead of the number: "Golf is an integral part of the experience here at Turning Stone and attracts people from around the country."

The rate barely moved to pay for it. Seven new holes bought a $50 rise, and the board lost things on the way.

Source: Turning Stone Resort Casino, rate page as of September 7, 2026 and the 2005 rate page via the Internet Archive. Peak 18-hole rate for a non-resort guest; the 2005 board also sold nine holes and an eight-rounds-for-six package.

Peak 18 holes	2005	2026
Public	$125	$175
Nine holes	$60–$65	not sold
Eight rounds for six	$640	not sold

Here is every 18-hole rate on the property.

Source: Turning Stone Resort Casino, posted rates for 18 holes as of September 7, 2026. Cart included at the three championship courses; $14 extra at the nine-hole courses, where one price covers card holders, resort guests and the public alike.

Course	Fri–Sun	Mon–Thu	Fall, Fri–Sun
Atunyote	$275	$250	None published
Kaluhyat	$175	$160	$140
Shenendoah	$175	$160	$140
Pleasant Knolls	$26	$26	$26
Sandstone Hollow	$26	$26	$26

Two courses at $175. Two at $26. One at $275. Nothing in the middle, and nothing about the golf explains the gaps.

What the counties gave up

The fight that ended in 2013 began in the Supreme Court. The Oneida had been buying their old reservation back on the open market, parcel by parcel, and arguing that the land resumed its sovereign status when they did. In City of Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation, decided in 2005, the Court said no. Madison and Oneida counties then billed the Nation for property tax and moved to foreclose when it did not pay.

The federal district court ruled the other way, on a New York statute exempting "real property in any Indian reservation owned by the Indian nation, tribe or band occupying them" from taxation. The Oneida reservation had never been disestablished. So the counties could not tax the land, and the Nation could not simply declare it sovereign. Both sides appealed, and putting the land in trust was the exit from a fight neither could finish.

Title to all of this is now held by the United States, in trust for the Oneida Indian Nation. Interior approved the fee-to-trust request in May 2008 and the transfer completed in 2010, covering 13,004 acres. Its inventory of what sat inside that acreage is specific:

"Five neighboring golf courses (Atunyote, Kaluhyat, Shenendoah, Pleasant Knolls, and Sandstone Hollow), a golf dome, and two club houses."

Trust land pays no state or local property tax, and the same document works out what that cost the neighbors.

Start with the casino. Verona had the casino parcel on its books at $362.55M, which at 2005 rates would be $12.2M of property tax a year. That one parcel accounted for 80% of everything the town had assessed on all Nation land. Interior found the assessment unlawful anyway, so the money was never collectable, but the town had been carrying it as though it were.

Take it off the rolls and the hole is the size of the town. Interior calculated that Verona stood to lose about $872,817 a year, which is 107.6% of everything the town raises in property tax. The Vernon-Verona-Sherrill School District stood to lose $10.16M, or 99.7% of its levy.

Both numbers run at or past the whole levy for a reason the department states plainly. Verona had already stopped counting the casino in its assessed value, following 2005 state legislation that required Oneida County tax rates to be set as though the Nation's land were exempt. The town wrote the casino off its books before the federal government made it official.

In 2013 the Nation, New York State, and Oneida and Madison counties settled everything. The Nation pays the state 25% of the net win on its slot machines. The state hands a quarter of that to Oneida County, plus $3.5M a year to Madison and $2.5M a year to Oneida for just over 19 years. The agreement is explicit about what the counties took it in exchange for:

"tax revenues of any kind that the Counties will not receive from the Nation in the future ... because of the trust status of Nation Land."

The counties traded their property tax claim for a cut of the slot machine revenues. Ninety holes of golf are standing on the ground they gave up.

Where the water comes from

The trust decision contains the strangest fact available about golf at Turning Stone, and it is not about any one course. Interior, listing what the Nation had done for its neighbors, recorded an arrangement with the City of Oneida:

"the Nation ... utilize over 90% of the wastewater effluent from the City's wastewater treatment plant to irrigate its golf courses, which reduces stress both on groundwater resources and on Oneida Creek, which would otherwise receive the effluent."

Effluent is what comes out of a sewage plant once it has been treated. The City of Oneida sends more than nine tenths of it to the golf courses.

Ninety holes, watered with a city's treated sewage, in a deal a federal agency counted as a public benefit. The creek was going to get it either way.

The water is not the only thing the Nation put on the environmental record. Audubon International certifies golf courses that manage water, chemicals and habitat to its standard, and it runs two programs: Signature certification for courses enrolled while they are being designed and built, and the Cooperative program for courses that already exist.

Interior named three of these five as Certified Bronze Audubon Signature Sanctuaries: Shenendoah, Kaluhyat and Sandstone Hollow, all built by the Nation and enrolled from the ground up. Kaluhyat's scorecard prints that badge beside the PGA's and the superintendents' association's. Atunyote was built by the Nation too and went the ordinary route instead, so its card carries the Cooperative badge. Pleasant Knolls, bought rather than built, carries neither.

The four words the website deletes

Pick up a scorecard at Kaluhyat and there is a crest on the cover. A sun rising behind blue peaks, closed into a circle, the name in a cream script, and under it four words in a lighter weight: Golf Club at Turning Stone. Bottom left, the resort's wordmark. Bottom right, in small capitals, DESIGNED BY ROBERT TRENT JONES JR. Shenendoah's card is the same card with a stag in the circle and Rick Smith's name in the corner.

Those four words are the point. A golf club is somewhere with members and a crest and a name it expects you to have heard of. Somebody paid a designer to say these courses were that, then paid again to credit the architect on the cover the way a gallery credits a painter.

The stag is worth one more look. Shenendoah's crest is the only place the Nation ever says what the course is named after, and it says it without using a word.

Atunyote's card gives the age of all this away, and it can be dated to the day. The scorecard the resort still publishes was drawn on August 26th 2011, in Adobe Illustrator and the PDF says so in its own metadata. Everything printed on it agrees. A Condé Nast award from 2010. A replay rate of $100 that is $135 today. A Twitter handle, on card stock, for a company that stopped being Twitter in 2023.

The eagle on that card is gold and red with a registered trademark symbol inside the circle, and Tom Fazio's signature sits under the name in his own hand. Nobody has redrawn it in 15 years.

Now open the website. The same three crests are there and they have been stripped. Flattened to white line over a photograph of grass, no color, no trademark, and the four words gone. Atunyote, Kaluhyat, Shenendoah, and nothing about a club. Frankly, all the logo marks are staid.

The two cheap courses sit further down. Pleasant Knolls has a painted heron standing in a marsh, which is what a nine-hole course from 1950 looks like when it is bought rather than built and nobody bothers to restyle it. Sandstone Hollow has a flagstick and a swoosh. It is dull because nothing was riding on it.

Here is what that adds up to. The crests were drawn for a place that wanted to be a golf club. The website is run by a place that sells tee times. Where the two disagree the website wins, because that is where the money changes hands.

What the golf is for

The Nation paid $89M under the settlement in 2023 and $665M since 2013. Run that backward through the rate in the agreement and it implies roughly $356M of reported net win on Oneida slot machines in 2023. Net win means money wagered less money paid out, before expenses, on slot machines only. Table games, hotels, food and golf all sit outside it. The figure also covers all three of the Nation's casinos rather than this one, so treat it as a floor on the gaming business, not a measure of Turning Stone.

The state's own auditor found a wrinkle in that number. The Comptroller examined the Gaming Commission's oversight of casino revenue in a report published in January 2020. It found that the Commission desk-audits the self-reported gaming records of exactly one tribal casino in New York, the Saint Regis Mohawk one, because of the others:

"the other tribe/nations either are not required to submit this information or are disputing the revenue payments."

The same audit found the Commission "did not evaluate risks related to revenue reporting for each tribe/nation casino," where its risk assessments for commercial and slot-parlor casinos cover precisely that. So the figure New York's 25% is calculated from is reported by the Nation and not independently tested by the state collecting on it. Nobody has alleged it is wrong. It is simply not checked the way a commercial casino's number is.

Against a number that size the golf is a rounding error. Three championship courses run a season of roughly mid-May to late October in Central New York. At the rates on the board they plausibly turn over something on the order of $10M in green fees, which is our estimate and a generous one. Call it 3% of what the slot machines hold.

There will never be a better figure than that. The Nation is a sovereign and publishes no financial statements. Its credit facilities are private syndications, including a $440M revolver that closed in September 2025, and the rating on its 2024 tax revenue bonds was a private rating.

But the owner's own paperwork gives the game away. In February 2026 the Nation published its account of the year just gone: $855M invested, $224.6M of it capital, $305.8M in payroll and benefits, 5,200 people employed. The release names what the money built. The Crescent hotel. Salt. The Grand Expo. The Forest Grill. Birch Trading Co. A cannabis dispensary in Bridgeport.

It does not name a golf course. Neither did the 2023 release, and neither did the fact sheet for 2018.

Ninety holes of golf, a Fazio, a Jones and two courses by Rick Smith, and golf is not mentioned once in any of them.

Nothing here is priced against what it cost, because nothing here has had to earn its own keep. A dispensary in Bridgeport makes the annual report. Ninety holes, three name architects and a course that was on network television for five straight years do not, and the reason is that they were never the business. They are the reason to make the drive.