Kansas City golf course with lawn care goof will be closed for at least another month
Jackson County’s golf course goof just got worse.
The Fred Arbanas Golf Course at Longview Lake has extended its closure until mid-June due to a mistake that damaged the greens on 95 percent of the course. It had been scheduled to reopen next week after being shut down for a month while the greens were repaired.
The county said the new reopening date is June 11.
“I know this is not the news that any of us want to hear,” Parks + Rec Director Michele Newman said in a news release late Thursday afternoon. “It was not an easy decision for us to make, however, it is necessary as preparing the best putting surface possible takes time and patience. We are taking every measure possible to ensure our patrons have the golfing experience they expect at Fred Arbanas when we reopen.”
The county closed the course after determining that chemicals applied to the greens last fall left brown spots on 95 percent of them. New sod was hauled in from Colorado at a cost of $28,000, but it was dormant and some of it did not take root after it was laid, the county said.
“The inclement weather and snow also hindered the growing process,” the county’s news release said.
The dead sod is being replaced by a local supplier at a cost of an additional $3,000, Newman said, but her fingers are crossed.
“The weather will also have an impact on our efforts, so we are hopeful conditions are better than they have been the past few weeks to allow us to reopen by our tentatively scheduled date,” Newman said.
The Star was the first to report the turf maintenance mishap. Between the cost of buying and laying the Colorado sod, along with a month’s worth of lost revenues from golfers, the county had estimated it would be out more than $120,000.
Of that total, $85,000 was in lost revenue for April. Closing the course for another month or more would seem to push the overall financial hit past $200,000. But officials did not make themselves available for comment Thursday evening.
The county has not disclosed who made the mistakes that damaged the course.
In April, workers began replacing damaged sod on the course’s greens with sod hauled in from a Colorado supplier who grew the same variety as the damaged turf. The county’s own sod farm was depleted from last year’s renovation of the county’s Par 3 course, according to a memo from Newman to County Executive Frank White obtained by The Star.
Newman requested the emergency purchase in March, after discovering that the excessive application of pre-emergent herbicide last fall had killed the grass.
When the county announced on its website in early April that the course was being closed for greens restoration, it did not volunteer why the work was needed at the start of the golf season when tee times were in great demand.
Of bigger financial concern was the hit to county revenues, as green fees and other purchases at the course help support other Parks + Rec activities.
“It is our parks department’s largest generator of revenue,” Dan Tarwater, chairman of the county legislature, explained at a public meeting on April 12 without letting on why the renovation was needed at that time with an emergency purchase order.
The A-4 Bentgrass sod from Colorado arrived in two shipments in refrigerated trucks, Newman said in her memo to White.
The Colorado supplier was chosen because no local sod farms grow that variety, according to an April 5 finance department memo sent to the nine county legislators.
Thursday’s news release did not say whether that same variety is now being used to replace the dead sod, and if so who is supplying it.
At the April 12 meeting, Tarwater asked that golfers withhold judgment on the appearance of the new greens until the sod had a chance to get established. He said the new turf was dormant when it was cut and delivered to the course, which in 1999 was named in honor of the former county legislator and Kansas City Chiefs player Fred Arbanas, who died this month.
“It’s going to be better and stronger” than the decade-old turf it replaced, he said then.
