City Park, sans golf course?

Edging closer to 1,000 signatures, an online petition is bringing the debate about City Park’s golf course back into the limelight. Should the 9-hole course be maintained and City Park grow around it, or should it be eliminated and the grounds added to the park’s existing green space?

The Change.org petition Rolfe McCollister Jr.—CEO of Louisiana Business Inc., which owns 225—started about three weeks ago has led to the creation of a grassroots committee by nearby resident Bryan Jones. The group is called Spark City Park.

“I’ve lived in the neighborhood for a year and a half,” Jones says. “I’ve been in Baton Rouge for about 12 years, and I’ve always wondered what the potential of City Park could be beyond the golf course.”

While Carolyn McKnight, BREC’s superintendent, told the Business Report earlier this week, “We’re not taking sides on either side of the issue,” she did say they are excited that people are showing renewed interest in improving the park, especially as BREC prepares for another round of community surveys about future plans for the BREC system.

In 2002, McCollister unsuccessfully petitioned to put a parish library on the golf course grounds. In response, supporters of the course fought to get it included on the National Register of Historic Places—it was built in 1928.

But BREC has long been floating the idea of converting the course to passive park space. In 2005, BREC commissioned two conceptual designs of the park with and without the golf course.

The first design, keeping the golf course:

The second design, without the golf course:

Both designs utilize the City Park Lake, filling in a portion of the northern shore for a boathouse, piers and a café. The non-golf course design replaced the grounds with plenty of walking paths and gardens, a new pavilion and expansive lawn along East Lake Shore Drive, picnic areas and an amphitheatre and stage.

In the same year the designs were commissioned, BREC conducted a survey that showed 34% of respondents wanted to keep the golf course, 30% wanted to eliminate it, and the rest were indecisive or gave no response. Only 11% of respondents said they played golf at City Park.

BREC plans to hire a consulting firm this summer to gather more public input on City Park and other parish parks. Jones has already met with BREC leadership, who he says have been very receptive of his efforts to organize a committee around the issue. He notes that the previous surveys only contacted residents with landline telephones, and is encouraging BREC to reach a broader audience through online surveys and other means.

“Let’s see where the public is and where the residents are today,” he says. “Perhaps they are at the same place where they were 10 years ago when this was debated, but my prediction is it’s not. Baton Rouge has changed quite a bit. … I don’t think we want to wait until the results of that survey for us to talk about whether or not the golf course should be there.”

Ted Jack, an assistant superintendent at BREC, wouldn’t comment on the possibility of eliminating the golf course, but acknowledged there are a lot of factors at play. “If you’re going to build something big and bold, it’s a question of where the money will be coming from and will it be a value to people,” Jack says.

While usage of City Park’s golf course has decreased in recent years—rounds dropped from 21,887 in 2009 to 16,335 in 2012—a renovation of the rest of City Park in 2007, plus the addition of a dog park in 2008, led to increased usage of the park’s more passive areas.

“We got a lot of things that came together to make that a special place,” Jack says. “The amount of use in that park since we renovated it is amazing. There are so many more people utilizing it. It’s wonderful.”

Jones is still in the organizing stages for the committee, and hopes to have a website and social media pages up soon to connect with more people. The important thing, he says, is to recognize that City Park is a designated community park—meaning the entire city can give input into how it’s utilized.

“It shouldn’t be about what my neighborhood wants only; it shouldn’t just be my voice,” he says. “The most important thing is to open the space up to everyone, not just the golfers, and at the same time preserving as much of the green space as we possibly can. I want it to be a great green space; I want it to be a centerpiece for city.”

The May 2012 “Idea Issue” of 225 looked at how City Park needs to embrace multi-use designs. A follow-up story looked at one LSU architecture student’s plans to “rewild” City Park—click here to read that story and see his full design plan.