Fiscal Responsibilty Meets Tommy Armour
Frankly, there's something fishy in St. Louis.

It's not the odor of steaming sewers in the humid evenings, although that is somewhat rancid. And it's not the odor of fish, because as we all know, if fish or poultry smells, it's inedible - and everything that comes out of the Mississippi smells.

No, it's the Forest Park Golf Courses.

A few years ago, as part of the re-beautification of Forest Park, the park management decided to re-do their golf course, which was at the time an 18-hole course of average layout and playability - it was alright, but not great. The new design, three 9-hole courses, is modeled after a layout originally done by professional golfer Hale Irwin, and you can tell that they did it right - the views are wonderful, there are still dozens of older trees lining the holes, the fairway grass (a bermuda/zoysia mix) is in great shape, the tees are nice...it's just great. And for 10 bucks for a weeknight play, it's really reasonably priced.

But that's not really the problem, or I wouldn't have titled this post as I did - the real problem is that this can't have been cheap. Not at all. First off, the course is managed by a subcontracter who's doing a good job, but charges a good deal of money. In the end, it's almost always cheaper to do anything yourself rather than contract it out - but the city's been working with American Golf Corp for many years, as they ran the old 18-hole course. Alone, I can live with the increased costs.

But then there's the cost of redoing the park the way Forest Park Forever wanted it redone - again, they did a good job. But the new lakes, the new water pump system, the new street design, 6.4 miles of new concrete roadbed for bicyclists, the removal of 6.4 miles of old roadbed and replacement of same with wood mulch for the runners, AND the hugely expensive costs of actually building a golf course. Here's a tidbit: If you can build a 9-hold golf course that has decent fairways and isn't totally flat for less than 5 million bucks, it's only because you're in Paraguay or Afghanistan. And Afghani grass doesn't take well.

For a city and metro area that can't afford to put streetlights on the highways, can't afford to pay someone to redo the downtown traffic lights' timing but every forty years, and can't afford to keep the schools open....this seems a little expensive. All told, Forest Park Forever raised 102 million dollars to rehabilitate Forest Park, which is owned by the city. And that's American dollars, so that's like 45 billion Canadian.

Frankly, Forest Park was a bit dingy and beat-up, but was it really 100 million bucks worth of beat-up? Wouldn't it have been better (correct me if I'm wrong) to, say, spend 40 million dollars repairing schools and improving educational curricula to make sure that future generations of St. Louisians actually had decent educations, which would bring in better employers looking for a more-intelligent workforce, which would improve average pay, which would improve tax collections, which would allow for increased public spending....

Or was it better to build another golf course?

(For information on the Forest Park renovation, click here. The golf course cost $12.5 million, and would have been more had one of the three new courses not included several holes from the old 18-hole Eisenhower course. The city itself spent 55 million bucks on the rehabilitation project.)