Is It Possible Nowadays to Renovate a Golf Course on a Tight Budget?

The Fried Egg Golf Podcast

thefriedegg.com

Golf, Sports

4.6 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 25 January 2024

⏱️ 63 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

With construction costs rising, the pricatag for renovating a golf course has gotten disturbingly big in the past couple of years. For low-budget public facilities, the dream of a transformative renovation has begun to seem out of reach. But in certain situations, good work can still be done on the cheap. Our guest today, Clay Payne, is the head superintendent at Buffalo Dunes, a municipal course in Garden City, Kansas, which is in the midst of a six-year renovation project. Clay talks with Garrett about how he and his crew have made a relatively small amount of money go a long way. They also discuss Clay's childhood on the sand-green courses of southwestern Kansas, his early-career jobs at Dismal River and Ballyneal, and how he has gotten the local community involved in his efforts at Buffalo Dunes. This episode of our Superintendent Series is brought to you by the Toro Company.

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm already upset when I find my ball in the bunker I'm really upset and when I find my ball in a fried egg
0:06.8	fried egg fried egg fried egg fried egg fried egg fried egg fried egg lie
0:11.8	I'm about ready to run off the golf course Welcome to the Friday Golf Podcast. I'm Garrett Morrison and today we're talking
0:39.7	about how to carry out a golf course renovation on a very tight budget.
0:45.4	My guest is Clay Payne, who is the superintendent at Buffalo Dunes in Garden City, Kansas.
0:52.2	Buffalo Dunes is a municipal golf course that you'll be hearing a lot about
0:55.9	in the coming years. And that's because Clay Payne, along with the architect Zach Vardy,
1:01.6	is undertaking a six-year renovation that is going to leave this
1:06.0	course looking like a cross between prairie dunes and wild horse. That's not
1:11.9	an exaggeration. The work really looks that good right now. And maybe the most
1:17.6	impressive thing about this project is the cost. It's way less than most renovations that are happening today. There is a
1:26.2	good article on this topic recently by Bradley Klein in the USGA Green
1:31.8	Section record. This article is called Managing the Rising
1:34.8	Cost of Golf Course Renovations. And basically what I found out from this
1:39.7	article is that the standard cost of major course renovations and we're talking about
1:45.8	replacing irrigation drainage, greens, bunkers, cart paths, this has become sort of
1:51.7	of the standard renovation.
1:54.2	It is a big project, but this is what we're used to talking about when we talk about
1:59.3	updating a golf course.
2:02.2	That sort of project has risen into the 10 to 20 million dollar range,
2:06.9	maybe higher. So jobs that used to cost 5 million are now more like 15 million and needless to say that's that's a
2:17.0	disturbing trend it's obvious why it's happening there are inflation issues
	...

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