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).