Flash: City Saves And Values Potential Of Its Public Golf Course

It can get pretty tiresome reading about all of the towns closing up their muni's because they are broke or not able to look past the current stories of golfing doom.

So Dan Barry's NY Times sports front pager on the East Orange Golf Course's resurrection by mayor Lester Taylor and others is a refreshing story of a city not giving up on its golf despite the prime real estate nature of the place.

It helped that the Mayor connected falling revenues with non-existent basics.

The new mayor, Lester E. Taylor III, studied the course’s scorecard. It was operating $372,000 in the red, its number of rounds was plummeting and its clubhouse was a musty tribute to groovy 1970s aesthetics. “If you wanted a cold beer or something to eat?” he said. “Guess what, you can’t.”

Mayor Taylor had campaigned on a platform of reimagination for his city, which straddles the inner-city vibe of Newark and the suburban hum of South Orange. But if the municipality was to be run more like a business, he had to address the casual management of a golf course detached both physically and psychologically from the city itself.

So just as the 2014 golf season was beginning, the mayor called a timeout for this timeless game. He and the City Council abruptly closed the course, naturally leading to speculation that the city planned to sell the property — in one of the country’s most exclusive ZIP codes — for redevelopment.

But East Orange had other plans for its Short Hills oasis.