Fort Myers-Run Florida Golf Course Criticized For Pricey Fees, Poor Upkeep
Ireland's Mary and Michael Feeley and Tadhg and Chris O'Connor were several days into their Florida golf vacation in Lee County last month when they ended up at Eastwood Golf Course.
Using only a glossy pamphlet on Southwest Florida courses as their guide, the couples booked an afternoon tee time for $60 per person. They expected to see a reasonably well-conditioned layout, one that once ranked among Golf Digest's top 50 public courses in the nation, let alone Florida.
What they found instead were many greens in such poor condition that Tadhg O'Connor said a course in similar disrepair in his homeland wouldn't even be open.
"You'd get nobody to pay a greens fee," said O'Connor, 61, who like his friends is from the south of Ireland in County Cork, home to such historic courses as Killarney and Ballybunion. "Certainly, that was the worst Florida golf course we played for the conditions."
"There's some very good golf holes, particularly on the back nine," said Michael Feeley, 56. "But the whole Florida golf course needed to be refurbished."
To the dismay of many golfers, that has been a common refrain at the popular municipal Florida golf course.
With the battered eighth green the most-glaring symbol of its diminished condition, Eastwood has prompted several letters to The News-Press editorial page in recent months from disgruntled golfers.
March 4, John and Jody Vansicklen of Commerce Township, Mich., wrote that Eastwood should inform golfers of deteriorated conditions before they play and should not charge full price.
"We went to the Florida golf course and paid our green(s) fees and soon learned there were no greens," wrote the Vansicklens, visitors to Fort Myers for several years. "The greens were brown."
Two weeks later, Fort Myers' Tony Wolff criticized the course's "deplorable" sand traps, cart paths "full of potholes," wooded areas "loaded" with uprooted tree stumps, and fairways with "large segments of browned-out grass or no grass at all," which are "likely diseased."
"Eastwood, and very likely Fort Myers Country Club, have fallen into a situation of so many municipal courses where the local powers that be probably spend the course revenues for their pet projects instead of returning an adequate amount of the revenue generated to maintain and improve the Florida golf course," Wolff wrote of Eastwood and fellow city-owned Fort Myers Country Club. "What we need is a golfing mayor."
The city's actual mayor, Jim Humphrey, said he has seen the letters and that Wolff's allegations just aren't true.
"I have been a proponent of enterprise funds all having a repair and replacement account, a reserve account and an operation and maintenance account," Humphrey said of self-sustaining operations. "If you continue to drain off the excess revenues, then you neglect (the enterprise)."
Humphrey and director of golf Rich Lamb, an independent contractor who runs the city's two courses, said Eastwood will close for six months in 2007 to undergo $1.5 million in renovations. Ultimately, the course is slated for about $4.5 million in improvements during the next three to four years.
The city recently had to abandon plans to add nine new holes at Eastwood because of what planners said will be a negative impact on Humphrey's goal to build affordable, "work-force" housing near the course. But Humphrey said money to improve Eastwood's existing facilities wasn't nixed.
"And now I think it's more important than ever to improve the 18 holes because we're going to have, I hope, a lot of people around there who will want to play there," he said. "So it's going to be very important."
Next year's Florida golf course renovations will focus on four projects: completely rebuild greens, level and resurface tee boxes, rebuild bunkers, and expand and upgrade irrigation. If there's enough money, Lamb said, Eastwood's driving range also will be renovated.
The money for the improvements will be borrowed at 4 percent interest from the city's utilities department.
The long-term improvements to the driving range and aging clubhouse will be repaid with some of the money from the The Bonita Bay Group sale of about 500 acres next to Eastwood for work force housing, Humphrey said.
"That will then ensure that it (Eastwood) can stay in the top 50 or wherever it is," Humphrey said of all the upgrades, terming the clubhouse improvements "not something extravagant, but to improve it to where people can really go there after the golf and talk and enjoy themselves.''
"Right now, they have to get in the car and go somewhere else," he said. "So I think we're missing the opportunity."
As for the existing conditions at Eastwood, Lamb said its troubled greens are primarily the result of an inability to water the course for more than a week after Hurricane Wilma in October and the ensuing dormant period for the course's bermuda grass greens through the winter.
The problem was made worse on the eighth green, Lamb said, by poor drainage below the surface. Heavy watering to promote some growth resulted in a soggy, unhealthy environment, Lamb said. A last-ditch effort to overseed with rye grass in December also proved fruitless.
Fort Myers Country Club does overseed its bermuda greens each fall and is noticeably lush in the winter. Lamb said that course is overseeded because its tiny greens would not be able to withstand the heavy, concentrated foot traffic of winter if they were bermuda alone. The lush overseed color also presents better for the Beck's Open held in February, Lamb said.
Because foot traffic is not as concentrated on Eastwood's larger greens, the course's bermuda turf normally is able to maintain its health and playability through the winter, Lamb said.
In just a few weeks, he emphasized, Eastwood's bermuda greens will hit their growth phase, while the overseed on Fort Myers Country Club's greens will begin dying off. That will leave an uneven period at Fort Myers Country Club before the bermuda takes over again.
And so Lamb expects feedback on the two city courses — that Eastwood looks "terrible" and "The Fort," as it's known, looks great — to switch 180 degrees.
As for other complaints about Eastwood, Lamb said that nearly all of the uprooted tree stumps from Wilma have been removed, more than 200,000 tons of sand have been added to its 84 bunkers, and its cart paths are only in need of an "overlay."
The paths at Fort Myers Country Club, he said, were scheduled to be resurfaced last fall, but that Florida golf course project was postponed because of Wilma. Lamb said the $88,000 job will be done in the next few weeks and will be paid for from the course's own revenues.
Using only a glossy pamphlet on Southwest Florida courses as their guide, the couples booked an afternoon tee time for $60 per person. They expected to see a reasonably well-conditioned layout, one that once ranked among Golf Digest's top 50 public courses in the nation, let alone Florida.
What they found instead were many greens in such poor condition that Tadhg O'Connor said a course in similar disrepair in his homeland wouldn't even be open.
"You'd get nobody to pay a greens fee," said O'Connor, 61, who like his friends is from the south of Ireland in County Cork, home to such historic courses as Killarney and Ballybunion. "Certainly, that was the worst Florida golf course we played for the conditions."
"There's some very good golf holes, particularly on the back nine," said Michael Feeley, 56. "But the whole Florida golf course needed to be refurbished."
To the dismay of many golfers, that has been a common refrain at the popular municipal Florida golf course.
With the battered eighth green the most-glaring symbol of its diminished condition, Eastwood has prompted several letters to The News-Press editorial page in recent months from disgruntled golfers.
March 4, John and Jody Vansicklen of Commerce Township, Mich., wrote that Eastwood should inform golfers of deteriorated conditions before they play and should not charge full price.
"We went to the Florida golf course and paid our green(s) fees and soon learned there were no greens," wrote the Vansicklens, visitors to Fort Myers for several years. "The greens were brown."
Two weeks later, Fort Myers' Tony Wolff criticized the course's "deplorable" sand traps, cart paths "full of potholes," wooded areas "loaded" with uprooted tree stumps, and fairways with "large segments of browned-out grass or no grass at all," which are "likely diseased."
"Eastwood, and very likely Fort Myers Country Club, have fallen into a situation of so many municipal courses where the local powers that be probably spend the course revenues for their pet projects instead of returning an adequate amount of the revenue generated to maintain and improve the Florida golf course," Wolff wrote of Eastwood and fellow city-owned Fort Myers Country Club. "What we need is a golfing mayor."
The city's actual mayor, Jim Humphrey, said he has seen the letters and that Wolff's allegations just aren't true.
"I have been a proponent of enterprise funds all having a repair and replacement account, a reserve account and an operation and maintenance account," Humphrey said of self-sustaining operations. "If you continue to drain off the excess revenues, then you neglect (the enterprise)."
Humphrey and director of golf Rich Lamb, an independent contractor who runs the city's two courses, said Eastwood will close for six months in 2007 to undergo $1.5 million in renovations. Ultimately, the course is slated for about $4.5 million in improvements during the next three to four years.
The city recently had to abandon plans to add nine new holes at Eastwood because of what planners said will be a negative impact on Humphrey's goal to build affordable, "work-force" housing near the course. But Humphrey said money to improve Eastwood's existing facilities wasn't nixed.
"And now I think it's more important than ever to improve the 18 holes because we're going to have, I hope, a lot of people around there who will want to play there," he said. "So it's going to be very important."
Next year's Florida golf course renovations will focus on four projects: completely rebuild greens, level and resurface tee boxes, rebuild bunkers, and expand and upgrade irrigation. If there's enough money, Lamb said, Eastwood's driving range also will be renovated.
The money for the improvements will be borrowed at 4 percent interest from the city's utilities department.
The long-term improvements to the driving range and aging clubhouse will be repaid with some of the money from the The Bonita Bay Group sale of about 500 acres next to Eastwood for work force housing, Humphrey said.
"That will then ensure that it (Eastwood) can stay in the top 50 or wherever it is," Humphrey said of all the upgrades, terming the clubhouse improvements "not something extravagant, but to improve it to where people can really go there after the golf and talk and enjoy themselves.''
"Right now, they have to get in the car and go somewhere else," he said. "So I think we're missing the opportunity."
As for the existing conditions at Eastwood, Lamb said its troubled greens are primarily the result of an inability to water the course for more than a week after Hurricane Wilma in October and the ensuing dormant period for the course's bermuda grass greens through the winter.
The problem was made worse on the eighth green, Lamb said, by poor drainage below the surface. Heavy watering to promote some growth resulted in a soggy, unhealthy environment, Lamb said. A last-ditch effort to overseed with rye grass in December also proved fruitless.
Fort Myers Country Club does overseed its bermuda greens each fall and is noticeably lush in the winter. Lamb said that course is overseeded because its tiny greens would not be able to withstand the heavy, concentrated foot traffic of winter if they were bermuda alone. The lush overseed color also presents better for the Beck's Open held in February, Lamb said.
Because foot traffic is not as concentrated on Eastwood's larger greens, the course's bermuda turf normally is able to maintain its health and playability through the winter, Lamb said.
In just a few weeks, he emphasized, Eastwood's bermuda greens will hit their growth phase, while the overseed on Fort Myers Country Club's greens will begin dying off. That will leave an uneven period at Fort Myers Country Club before the bermuda takes over again.
And so Lamb expects feedback on the two city courses — that Eastwood looks "terrible" and "The Fort," as it's known, looks great — to switch 180 degrees.
As for other complaints about Eastwood, Lamb said that nearly all of the uprooted tree stumps from Wilma have been removed, more than 200,000 tons of sand have been added to its 84 bunkers, and its cart paths are only in need of an "overlay."
The paths at Fort Myers Country Club, he said, were scheduled to be resurfaced last fall, but that Florida golf course project was postponed because of Wilma. Lamb said the $88,000 job will be done in the next few weeks and will be paid for from the course's own revenues.
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