Residents of Ann Arbor have twice defeated attempts to dispose of Huron Hills Golf Course. A2Politico reported on the efforts here, where residents retained a lawyer and alleged that Mayor and Council were breaking the law in attempts to outsource course operations. A2Politico also interviewed a member of the A2P2 neighborhood group formed to combat the efforts of politicos such as Second Ward Council member Stephen Rapundalo and John Hieftje who were trying to use bogus accounting methods to convince the public that Huron Hills Golf Course was losing money hand-over-fist (the course turned a modest 3 percent profit last year).
The fear among those who’ve been fighting this battle since 2006-2007, is that Hieftje wants to sell Huron Hills for development, or so alleges Ted Annis, a former mayoral appointee to the Board of the Ann Arbor Transportation Authority. Annis told A2Politico in a January 2011 interview:
Having talked about this issue [repurposing of Huron Hills Golf Course] on January 22, 2011 with a member of City Council, I gained the impression that the Mayor, not Roger Fraser, is the person behind the scenes driving and orchestrating both the current attempts at “repurposing” Huron Hills and the previous attempts to sell it and that the members of the Council Majority are supportive because they have been so instructed.
Public golf courses, whose audience has gone the way of plaid slacks, are being remade by more cities into parks and other more in-demand amenities. Peter Harnik and Ryan Donahue report in Landscape Architecture Magazine that idle fairways are increasingly attractive to urban planners, asking, “What is the future of golf in crowded, park-hungry cities?”:
The game of golf has never been an efficient use of space (hence the development of mini golf) but in the past it could be argued that it was still worthwhile public investment that subsidized a system’s other parks through green fees. No longer. Golf’s popularity is not keeping up with population growth nor the explosion in the number of private golf venues; it’s also losing out to other self-directed activities like running and cycling.
The repurposing of golf courses has been happening for a few years, but the trend shows no signs of waning. According to the November 2009 issue of Governing magazine:
Not that golf is going away. But in many American communities, it is being viewed more as a luxury than as a public service. The Parks Board in Richmond, Indiana, recently voted to turn the 85-year-old Glen Miller links from a nine-hole course into a three-hole practice facility, with the rest of the space given over to general recreation. In North Las Vegas, Nevada, golfers played their last round at the Craig Ranch municipal course in May. The site is to become a 135-acre regional park, with a children’s play area, a dog park, picnic grounds and trails set to open next summer.
After Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans repurposed some of the land that formerly held four golf courses covering 520 acres. The area now features a boardwalk, a dock, a meadow concert venue, a nature trail, and a very popular walking and jogging trail. National City, California, is considering turning a golf course into a park that has a soccer field, a restored creek, a community farm, and biking and walking paths. And in San Francisco, one landscape architecture instructor at the University of California at Berkeley assigns his students to remake the city’s Lincoln Park Golf Course for other public uses that include a profit-generating feature: “Among the proposals that have emerged,” Landscape Architecture Magazinereports, “are urban farms, bamboo forests, green cemeteries, aquifer recharge facilities, abalone farms, and municipal-scale composting facilities.”
It’s not always about ripping up the greens, though, according to Harnik and Donahue, whose research was supported by the Trust for Public Land’s Center for City Park Excellence. Pressure for other uses has led some golf courses to incorporate features that appeal to the non-golfing public. In Houston, runners advocated for and got a trail around a city course. In a Washington, D.C., suburb, golfers under fire for a driving-range expansion responded by agreeing to make the facility more friendly to the environment and to wildlife.
And some cities are simply letting ordinary people, those common folk who know nothing about bogies or mulligans, use the greens at certain times. This is anything but a new idea in the golf world, LAM reminds us:
The idea has an eminent precedent—St. Andrews in Scotland, hallowed ground for golfers everywhere, has traditionally opened up as a regular park for the townspeople on Sundays.
Mike Anglin said it well: Proceeding with Fuller Road Station is like signing a contract with the final two pages blank. We don’t really know what we’ll get out of the proposed plan other than a big parking structure, and we don’t really know the sources of funding for the proposed project. Why would we do that? Assuming that grant money will appear to support operations, is unrealistic, and is not really a plan. We citizens have funded well over $600,000 in planning for a parking structure, without any solid plan or significant community gain for the expense.
Another example of an attempt to repurpose park land happened in the past year, when the city proposed football Saturday parking in Allmendinger and Freisinger Parks. The end result was projected to have a net gain of $30,000. Hardly worth the staff time, the cleanup and repair costs to the parks. It was another “temporary” approach to use parking to degrade the parks, with who knows what goal for the future when the community would have become accustomed to parking.
We have a referendum requirement on sale of park land. The repurposing without sale is a distortion and is deceptive to the public in a community that loves its parks.
A premise of the re-purposing described here is that golf courses use is falling. I’m not sure that is the case in Ann Arbor. The statistics that I have seen suggest that more rounds are being played on Ann Arbor’s two courses now than in the past.
The general idea of walking/jogging paths around the Leslie and Huron Hills courses is intriguing. These are lovely spaces, and the idea of enlarging their non-consumptive use is appealing. Exactly how to do this in a way that avoids conflicts with golf is an important issue; assuming that there is a reasonable way to work this out, this could be a great idea.
The phrase, “Repurposing” , in Ann Arbor’s current secretive, hidden-agenda, opaque political climate has an ominous ring; it sounds like “Use-limiting commercial development”, not “Increasing public uses of public spaces”.
As Karen points out, the re-purposing of part of Fuller Park, outside the process adopted by citizen vote into our charter, makes discussion of “Repurposing” seem unwise in the current climate. This is too bad, because there might well be ways of adding recreational uses to the golf courses. City Hall’s climate of distrust makes it hard to encourage creative discussions for fear they will be hijacked by the unscrupulous for ends not in the public interest.
Golf courses aren’t the only parks that will be repurposed. Hieftje is also pushing through his plan to repurpose Fuller Park by building a large parking structure there to serve commuters to the new UM Hospital.
Plans to repurpose 10 acres of Fuller park have been in the works since at least 2004, when the city got an appraisal of the site for the purpose of a potential sale to the UM. The appraised value was $4.2 million. The UM gets this multimillion dollar piece of property for only $19,381 per year, which was less than the $69,552 per year the U was paying for use of the 250 surface parking spaces on the site.