October golf numbers down due to weather

There were no surprises at the Joint Advisory Committee on Golf meeting last week. Golf rounds for October were down, but that could be explained by a series of bad-weather days.

There were two flooding events in October, which meant both the Country Club and Kingswood were closed 11 days in October. The front nine at Scotsdale hasn’t yet reopened. Even the Highlands lost three days due to flooding.

Darryl Muldoon, golf operations director told the committee that both revenue and number of rounds were down for the year to date compared to the same period in 2018. Only nonmember revenue and merchandise revenue showed increases.

He’s still waiting for bids on a project that will allow nine holes at Berksdale to reopen. A bridge on that course was damaged earlier in the summer and closed to traffic. The plan will reroute golf carts away from the bridge, but Muldoon wants to add some fencing to make two-way traffic on the path safer. He’s been trying to obtain bids on the fencing before the committee considers it. The nine holes will not open before next spring, he said.

Golf maintenance director Keith Ihms said his staff is still

cleaning up from the series of bad-weather events that began with the windstorm in August. This week, he expects a business that grinds unwanted timber to be in town, working on the piles of trees and branches that have been knocked down over the past few months. The large root balls left when the trees blew over cannot be ground and he’s not sure how to dispose of them.

He’s also expecting an engineer to visit Scotsdale, where the creek bed was damaged by the October storms, putting two golf cart bridges in danger.

Meanwhile, the University of Arkansas is preparing to study bluebirds on the golf courses, comparing the population on the closed courses to the open courses, Ihms said.

The committee agreed to extend a trial program for handicapped and elderly golfers until late March, in spite of some reported abuse. The program allows people with handicaps or those over the age of 80 to add a special flag to their carts that signals their right to drive carts close to the green or their ball. So far, Ihms said, he’s seen no damage from the increased traffic. When carts are confined to paths only, the flags are not distributed.