More Public Golf Courses under threat (City Park in New Orleans)

Before beginning, let me just clarrify before the "New Orleans is a shitehole" crowd come to comment, that City Park (despite its name) is NOT under the purview of the City of New Orleans government, gets NO funding from them, and is NOT run by them, and is in fact a state-chartered entity.

City Park currently has two golf courses-- a small, tight, beginner course called Bayou Oaks North and a nice, recently created Bayou Oaks South. Here is an aerial photo with the two courses delineated:


The park is now undertaking a master planning process. This is being done at the behest of a replacement hired after the retirement of longtime CEO Bob Becker. Bob oversaw and orchestrated the Park's rebound and multiple improvements after Katrina. That new replacement, Cara Lambright, is an out-of-towner originally from Dallas. She retained a planning firm out of New York City to undertake this new master plan, and the only local consultant participation is the firm handling public outreach and involvement.

As a planner, I am interested in the goings-on, and attended a public meeting last night. Two major concepts announced were a new "parkway promenade" and a "wooded island". The rendering below shows these improvements on the same area as the existing golf courses shown above:


I noticed that some of these new improvements overlaid and would affect the golf courses. Here is a combo with the improvements overlaid over an aerial photo of the existing situation:


Using that, I did an outline over existing holes affected:


Clearly, this would affect both golf courses, and i finally saw on one of the boards last night, their intent was in plain English for all to see:


This crap is ridiculous.

No. 1, this is being proposed after the number of golf courses in the park has been reduced by half from FOUR courses to TWO in the last twenty years (many old timers on the board may remember the South, East, West and North courses being in place almost up to Katrina).

No. 2, it's being proposed just SEVEN years after the state-of-the-art Bayou Oaks South course was completed in 2017 at a cost of $24.5 million.

No. 3, City Park's golf courses are a SIGNIFICANT moneymaker for the park, which has ALWAYS struggled for funding, in fact it WAS (other than one year) the largest single source of income for the park prior to Katrina. Yet they want the situation to be (as President/CEO herself stated), "We're probably going to have less golf too and return a lot of golf to park land". Which, of course, makes NO money.

Just can't get over how stupid and ridiculous this world has become...