Take a Mulligan at Sharp Park

It's time for San Francisco to take a mulligan at Sharp Park: Let's take another shot and build a better public park, a park that will protect the environment and create a recreational space that everyone can enjoy.

Sharp Park golf course is beset by numerous problems. It is losing money, it needs millions of dollars in capital improvements and the golfers who play there give it failing grades in nearly every category the National Golf Foundation measures.

It is also killing two of the Bay Area's most wondrous and imperiled animals: the endangered San Francisco garter snake - arguably the most beautiful and imperiled serpent in North America - and the threatened California red-legged frog - the largest frog native to the West, made famous by Mark Twain's short story "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County."

Most of these problems can be directly traced to golf architect Alister MacKenzie's original design. The design required dredging and filling the coastal landscape for 14 months, and it destroyed a natural barrier that provided Sharp Park with protection from the Pacific Ocean. Thus, a huge coastal storm permanently damaged the links. Eventually a levee was constructed along the coastal edge of Sharp Park, and several links were moved into an upland canyon. But rather than solving the flooding problem, the levee and redesign exacerbated it. The new design blocked the natural water seeps and outflows through Sharp Park to the ocean, and the course now floods during normal winter rains.

The common sense thing to do at Sharp Park now is to close the golf course and turn management of the property over to the adjacent Golden Gate National Recreation Area. San Franciscans' No. 1 recreational demand is for more hiking and biking trails: golf comes 16th out of 19 activities in the same study. We can meet this demand by building trails connecting Sharp Park to Mori Point and Sweeny Ridge, while giving diverse user groups access to the property.

But golf advocacy groups have categorically rejected anything but 18 holes of golf at Sharp Park, and instead have proposed reducing costs by getting rid of the unionized workforce, privatizing course management, and creating an elite golf course that charges $80 to $120 per round to play, as compared to the $19 to $31 now charged. And they want to do this by re-creating MacKenzie's original design, the design that created the problems in the first place.

But if this proposal is adopted, even golfers will be worse off. Golf is overbuilt in the Bay Area, causing greens fees to drop and courses to close. If we continue to throw good money after bad on Sharp Park's poor design, other, better courses will be forced to shut down, and the game as a whole will suffer because of it.

By closing Sharp Park, San Francisco will realize a net savings of thousands of dollars annually in the money-losing golf program, and can reinvest this money to improve other municipal courses, increasing access to affordable golf throughout the city.

With San Francisco, Pacifica and the National Park Service working in partnership, Sharp Park can become a community-centered model for outdoor recreation, natural flood control and endangered species recovery, and our municipal golf courses can be improved. That's why nothing could be more prudent than turning Sharp Park into a national park: It protects the environment, it improves access to our open spaces and it's good for the game.

Brent Plater is the director of Restore Sharp Park (restoresharppark.org).

Restore Sharp Park!

Brent Plater Is a 2009 SF Weekly Best of San Francisco Winner

Restore Sharp Park!

On Tuesday the Board of Supervisors unanimously passed a bill that will start restoration planning at Sharp Park, located in Pacifica but owned and operated by San Francisco. It is an idea who's time has come.

Every environmentalist has demanded that scientific studies be conducted before any decision about Sharp Park’s future is made, including decisions about Sharp Park’s illicitly built and crumbling sea wall. The Mirkarimi bill expressly requires, based on the best scientific evidence available, that a restoration study be conducted along with alternatives that retain or redesign the golf course. The bill will force these studies to be integrated into the EIR process, but it will modify that process to ensure that restoration alternatives are considered along with existing alternatives that keep things largely as they are. Unfortunately, some have steadfastly opposed restoration studies, because for political and personal reasons he doesn’t want the status quo to change.

But the status quo cannot be maintained. The golf course loses too much money, it causes too much harm to the environment, and it exposes the surrounding community to flooding risks that will be exacerbated by climate change. In the face of these liabilities, subsidizing golf in San Mateo County for as little as $12 a round while San Francisco makes drastic cuts to basic city services simply cannot continue.

Status quo supporters propose a simplistic solution: raise prices. But if Sharp Park raises prices, fewer golfers will play there and the course’s deficit will increase. The Bay Area already supplies 6 million more rounds of golf than golfers demand, driving golf prices downward precisely when status quo proponents suggest we should raise them. Moreover, the National Golf Foundation found that golfers at Sharp Park have very little loyalty to the course and play there primarily because it is cheap. Because of this, San Francisco’s Budget Analyst concluded that Sharp Park cannot reduce its deficit by simply raising prices: golfers will just take their game elsewhere.

And Sharp Park’s deficit is substantial. Sharp Park has lost between $30,000 and $300,000 a year for the past four fiscal years from the golf fund alone. San Francisco’s other golf courses suffer for it, because they must subsidize Sharp Park’s losses, robbing other courses of needed maintenance. But that isn’t all it costs San Francisco to operate Sharp Park: Sharp Park also draws down the capital fund, the open space fund, and the natural areas program fund. In 2007, the Recreation and Parks Department concluded that these expenses will not be offset by revenue from Sharp Park, collectively resulting in millions of dollars in losses by 2013.

This may be chump change compared to San Francisco’s multi-billion dollar budget, but if this hemorrhaging were halted San Francisco would not need to make proposed cuts to City services, services that are already distributed inequitably. These funds could keep our community centers open after school so kids will have a safe place to stay until their parents return from work. They could even be used to improve San Francisco’s other golf courses that are suffering from deferred maintenance, or improve our playgrounds and dog parks to make them safe.

On top of all this, the scientific evidence makes it abundantly clear that Sharp Park golf course is the cause of harm to endangered species, not the cure for it. The San Francisco garter snake, arguably the world’s most beautiful and imperiled serpent, was considered “abundant” at Sharp Park in surveys conducted in the 1940’s—before the sea wall was built—but has declined precipitously in surveys ever since. In 2006 a US Fish and Wildlife Service report concluded that a San Francisco garter snake was killed by a lawn mower at Sharp Park, and in 2008 only one snake was seen at Sharp Park all year. The golf course has yet to implement a single mitigation measure for the snake.

Also in 2008—three years after mitigation measures for take of the California red-legged were reluctantly implemented by the golf course—biological investigators found “several” desiccated California red-legged frog egg masses at Sharp Park. This year investigators concluded that, subsequent to a $240,000 repair of the golf course’s pump house, entrainment of the frog’s egg masses and tadpoles can occur, sending them out to sea.

Environmentalists have been consistent in their message: use the best available science to consider restoration alternatives at Sharp Park before political deals are cut about the future of the land. With this information we can select the best choice for everyone at Sharp Park, including golfers, endangered species, and other recreational users of Sharp Park. The Mirkarimi bill will kick-start this process, and deserves support because of it.