(The following article is an excellent summary of the present Oak Knoll Golf Course situation. I am of a like mind with Curtis on this and using this as a starting point, I have some ideas – jim)
Oak Knoll Golf Course … A Commentary
By Curtis Hayden
Ashland Sneak Preview – August 2022
As a golfer for 63 years and a big fan of Oak Knoll Golf Course for 33 years, I’ll have to say that it was heart breaking to play at Oak Knoll in early July. The powers to be apparently decided to stop watering everything, and it showed. The funky fairways I could handle; Oak Knoll has never had great fairways during the summer. But the devastation on the greens was incomprehensible.
The average green on a golf course costs on average $50,000 to install, and you would think the owners of those greens would bend over backwards to safeguard their investment. Nope. The Parks & Recs Commission made the decision to stop watering the greens, and the results were predictable. One week before the TID water was turned on (July 7th), there was literally not a single blade of grass alive on any of the greens. They looked like the bottom of a lake bed that had been drained of water, with massive cracks forming fault lines. And the City had the gall to still charge top dollar to play the course.
After finishing my round, I decided to drive around town and see how the other city parks were faring with lack of water. Well guess what? They were all bright green because they were receiving adequate water. Why is it, my brain asked, that one city park was singled out for devastation, while the others all got their allotted amount of water? It didn’t make sense, especially when none of these parks, including Garfield, North Mountain, Clay Street, and the Railroad Park, make money.
Somehow, everyone in town does the requisite hand wringing over the fact that Oak Knoll doesn’t run a profit, but show me the books on Garfield Park. I would be willing to bet that when you take into account all the water that Garfield uses, plus all the maintenance costs for lawn mowing and pruning, its profit-loss margin would approximate that of Oak Knoll. The maintenance costs at Oak Knoll are definitely higher, but it’s also taking in money. On a good day, there are probably 300 paying golfers who use the course. I doubt if you’ll ever see Garfield Park attract 300 people in a day, but it was given all the water it needed.
AND, if you added up the acreage of all nine greens at Oak Knoll, it probably wouldn’t even total one acre. How hard would it have been to water one acre?
To help me out with these incomprehensible questions, I called Parks & Recs Commissioner Rick Landt, who has been on the Commission off and on for over 25 years. He started off by saying that even though he’s not a golfer, he was totally dismayed by what happened to the greens.
“We had some good spring rains, and we were hoping to last long enough until the TID water got turned on,” Landt said. “Unfortunately, that didn’t happen, and there was no way to water the greens independently because they’re all on one system. We could have gone through and hand watered the greens, but the Department is down from 39 full time employees to 33.”
I have a hard time understanding that excuse because I’ve seen maintenance guys at the golf course open up those sprinkler boxes and independently water selected areas of the course without turning on the entire system. That’s all water under the bridge, excuse the pun, because the damage has been done. Since the TID water was turned on, the greens are now getting watered again, but as of five days ago, there was still little grass to speak of—just a bunch of wet, soggy, muddy greens that are going to require a lot of tender loving care over the next four months to get them back to where they were.
All of that could have been avoided with a some regular watering, but apparently Oak Knoll wasn’t a very high priority for the Parks & Recs Commission.
Okay, when I was in high school, I built an 18-hole golf course in my ½-acre back yard (actually, there were only two greens, and they were all dirt, and you teed off from 18 different places in the yard). Eagle Eye Golf Course was very popular in the neighborhood, and I would hold tournaments with make-shift trophies, etc. My mother loved it because she didn’t have to bug me about mowing the lawn or weeding the flower gardens.
That being said, I just happen to know what it takes to maintain a golf course, as did Oak Knoll’s former manager Pat Oropallo, who corralled me at the course about five months before he resigned earlier last year, regaling me with a litany of complaints about how the City was not very supportive, and the course was going to hell in a handbasket.
I really don’t want to get into the politics behind all that, although I’m curious as to why the City would willfully destroy a City park, which just happens to be a golf course built in 1925, serving the residents of Ashland and neighboring communities, not to mention tourists who come to town.
Does it have to be a money maker? How much money does Garfield Park make? How about North Mountain Park? The Railroad Park? All of those are money losers, but did the Commission cut their water off and turn them into the Sahara Desert? I would love to see the books on every park in Ashland just to compare to Oak Knoll. It would surprise a lot of people.
As the owner and greenskeeper of Eagle Eye Golf Course (1961-1965), I can safely say that Oak Knoll could be redesigned and turned into a more golfer-friendly course. Could it ever be turned into a money maker? Possibly … even probably … but I doubt if we would want the Ashland Parks & Rec Commission to be involved. Anyone who thinks they can stop watering greens and still attract golfers should not be involved in any decision making when it comes to Oak Knoll Golf Course.
Would any outside entity want to take it over knowing the political minefield he or she would encounter? I would hope so, because that’s probably our best bet.