Owners of Alvamar Inc. elected a new majority for its board of directors Thursday night, ushering in a new era of leadership for a company whose two golf courses and country club set the tone for development of much of western Lawrence.

The vote, during a special meeting conducted at Alvamar Country Club, expanded the board from five to seven members and handed control of the company to a collection of individual owners known as the Alvamar Group of Concerned Investors.

Today the new board will gather to elect new officers, a move that will be expected to replace Beverly Smith Billings as Alvamar president. While Smith Billings won re-election to the board, today’s anticipated move would mark the first time since the company’s founding in 1967 that a Billings has not been in charge.

The group that pushed for the change in leadership now sets its sights on returning the company to profitability, after at least three years of red ink in golf course operations. The group said that the club’s recreational operations lost nearly $450,000 last year, or nearly $1.1 million when including interest expenses and depreciation.

The group wants to consider all its options – from cutting costs to looking into possibly selling one or both courses.

“I believe that the new board will make every effort to obtain the best national management that it can of golf courses in order to get them profitable, and explore every avenue to make Alvamar Inc. profitable and enhance the value of the shareholders’ investment and unlock the value for the shareholders – which, my clients believe, has not occurred in a pretty long period of time,” said Tom Murray, an attorney representing the group that placed five of its seven candidates on the board.

Retained from the previous board were Smith Billings, who became president upon the death of Bob Billings in 2003; and Bob Johnson, who joined the board last year and is chairman of the Douglas County Commission.

The election comes at a tumultuous time for Alvamar, whose previous board had been exploring its own strategic alternatives and – prompted by the investors’ group – hired an accounting firm to review the company’s own financial reporting practices.

Alvamar, which started as an undeveloped goat farm west of Kasold Drive, grew into a development powerhouse under Bob Billings and through partnerships he created. The operation had a hand in development of 3,000 acres west of Kasold and between Sixth Street and Clinton Parkway.

Tensie Oldfather, whose husband, Charley, invested in Alvamar as Lawrence expanded westward, said before Thursday’s meeting that it was too bad that discord between shareholders and board members had forced an election.

But with shares in her children’s’ trust not paying dividends, it didn’t surprise her to see investors’ frustrations grow.

“I hope it works out happily,” Oldfather said.