An interview with the Executive Vice President and
Chief Operating Offiicer of the Audubon Institute
 
November 2001 - Renee Sutton

Q: Now, a lot of what we have heard from both sides, mostly from the critical side, is that there have been plans A through F. Vernon Palmer mentioned these at the October 15 meeting. I have been looking for the prior plans, sort of an evolution of the plans, and I can’t seem to locate those. I know that is started sometime in 1998 or 1999. Could you give us a description of how this started and what you have worked up to?

DS: What they are referring to is when we hired the golf course architect, he did several layouts of the golf course itself with the holes in different locations—the yardage was different, the par was different. But it was all the same location. Two of the different versions have different clubhouse locations. That’s what they are referring to.

We took a look at the different layouts of the golf course and we met with the golf club who had the most interest. The primary objective of that was to get a golf course that they were comfortable playing and was as long as possible without expanding the perimeter of the golf course. It was always a push and shove, trying to get more yardage and the golf course architect saying that you can’t do that safely. You have to certain distances between fairways and all those golf course things. There were a variety of layouts for the course, and the final layout is slightly different than all of them. But the basic plan, in terms of where the golf course was, where the access was, where the parking was, remained the same. So that’s what the A-F was.

Q: Has a decision for the stables been made?

DS: No.

Q: On the Audubon Institute website you have the photos of the layout of the clubhouse and golf course. I was looking at that and I couldn’t quite understand what was what. The clubhouse is fairly self-explanatory, with the kitchen here and the dining room there, but with the golf course, do you have any—

DS: The site plan?

Q: Yes, the site plan. Can we look at that?

DS: This is an aerial photo. This is the one that the commission selected which basically places the clubhouse here [at the front of the Oak Grove]. This is what we are going forward on. The size of the clubhouse got reduced by a total of 10%, but the interior got reduced by 20% because we made more porches. The kitchen got cut 50% because that was the biggest concern. The dining area got cut in half too. There was an area next to the dining that could be made one room, that was meant for the golf, but could be used for a bigger dining room. What we did is take that room and make it totally separate from the kitchen and dining room, but we kept the space. We just made it separate so that it couldn’t be used as a dining room.

Q: That’s been one of the biggest issues in this whole thing. Is there a restaurant allowed in Audubon Park? Is this going to be a restaurant or what is this going to be?

DS: Read the zoning ordinance. It is a golf clubhouse. It is not a restaurant. A restaurant as defined in the zoning ordinance is not allowed in Audubon Park. A clubhouse is. This is a clubhouse by the zoning ordinance and by any normal definition of the word. The zoning ordinance specifically defines what a restaurant is.

Primarily what it is is a building that gets about half its revenues from selling food. Well, we’re going to get about 3% of our revenues from selling food because it’s a clubhouse. It sells tickets to the golf course, it rents carts, it sells stuff in the pro shop, and it provides a food service.

Q: Now I also noticed on your website that you have comments from Stan Stoker, and PGA professional. He praises the golf course. Have you conducted evaluations other than this that are available?

DS: Well, Stan’s been the golf pro here for about 20 years. We’ve never had anybody from the outside to determine the golf desire. We chose from a group of people who applied the best guy to do the job. He’s been working at St. Andrew’s in Scotland. The guy does stuff worldwide. He’s our expert basically that decides whether this is a really good golf experience. He was here yesterday actually. He was giddy as a kid about how neat he thought this thing was. And something he was talking about was how much more visible the oak trees are now and, in his opinion and in ours too, it’s more Olmsted design-like than the old golf course was, because the old golf course wasn’t designed by Olmsted. It was just there.

Q: How is this more like Olmsted’s design?

DS:The three things that Olmsted talked about when he addressed the [Audubon Park] Commission is Oak trees, rolling meadows, and lagoons.

Q: Other concerns of the golf course….the boundaries are to be maintained. There has been a lot of issue over the fact that even if the greens are in the same place, that Hurst Walk, the Meditation Walk, and the Linear Park have been shut off. According to the plans, they will continue to be shut off from public use.

DS: Yes.

Q: Isn’t that expansion of the golf course?

DS: No. That’s a new management of the golf course. We’re still working on that. But, there was not Linear Park.

If you look at the aerial photo, people walk on the golf course here. They’ve been walking on the golf course admittedly since the golf course was first built. But things have changed from a liability standpoint. Whether we should have been allowing people to walk on the golf course a year ago is kind of irrelevant. But we can’t, from a legal standpoint, allow people to walk on the golf course while it’s being used. We can work out something on the Hurst walk to allow access under certain conditions with certain sign-ins [sic? signage?]. We haven’t quite figured out how to do that. But the linear park concept is because some people have been walking on the golf course for some time. It is not a linear park, it’s a golf course. The linear park is over here [outside of the lagoon]. If people want to walk along the lagoon, they have the whole park side to walk on. This is the golf course. And this part is a hole, it always has been, and is not park.

Q: Will the Mediation [sic, "Meditation", tho "Mediation" has a certain relevance] Walk be reopened?

DS:Yeah. We’re going to have to move it about 20 feet. The Meditation Walk was a sign, and people walked in there. We’re going to make it better than it ever was.

Q: How’s that?

DS: Go out there and look at it. We haven’t done anything in that area of the park.

If you can figure out where a beautiful meditation walk is, more power to you.
So what’s it’s going to be is an actual meditation walk. It will be a landscaped walk.

Q: On your website, you talk about safety improvements. Walking across the golf course is obviously one of your safety concerns. What other improvements have you made?

DS:Well, it’s both for the golfers and the non-golfers, the people on the jogging path. There are design criteria for golf courses that define essentially how wide fairways have to be and how far away from a fairway a green or a tee has to be. So the new golf course meets all those criteria. It’s roughly at least 200 feet from a fairway and 100 feet from a green, I think, to allow for incompetent golfers. So that was the design criteria that was used for the new golf. The old golf course never had that criteria. The old golf course was designed way back in 1899 or 1900. It basically goes up and down. Then all the fairways basically become one. And the same thing with the jogging path. The trees help along the jogging path to some extent. The new holes will go away from the jogging path.

Q: How many holes are there going to be on this golf course?

DS:18. They are both 18 hole courses. The difference is that the total yardage on the holes on the old golf course was about 6400 yards and the yardage on the new golf course is about 4000. We lost a lot of distance because we had to put more space between the holes and therefore there wasn’t much room. We have to create horizontal distance instead of vertical.

This is where the term executive golf course comes in. I don’t know where they got the word executive, but executive golf course means short. Part of is because it plays quickly. So what we have is a par 62. The old course was a par 68. A normal golf course is a par 72. So what we have is a bunch of par 3 holes and couple par 4’s and 5’s. We have more short holes.

Q: In an interview with the Times-Picayune, you say, "From an aesthetic viewpoint, it will be phenomenal." You were talking about from the clubhouse to the golf course. So what are the visual aspects of the golf course that have been enhanced?

DS: This is kind of going back to what I was talking about before with Olmsted. Basically what we had before was a very flat course, forgetting even the maintenance problems. It was planted with some trees that were planted with absolutely no landscape intent at all. They were really there to protect people from being hit by golf balls. These lines of trees were planted by our staff over the last 30 years to keep people from being hit by golf balls. So what it was, in addition to being flat, your views of the golf course and the oak trees and the steeple over there, were really limited by these trees. They were planted for non-aesthetic purposes.

What happened is the designer, before he started, identified the trees that needed to be saved. And then the lagoons were dug and what the lagoons do is provide drainage and water, which if you look at the original Olmsted plan, that (what we have currently) probably is 20% of the lagoons in the park. It creates dirt for mounding rolling hills.

And by taking down the trees, it opens up the views to the 100 year old oak trees that are out there. And you see a bunch of sky, which for Olmsted was a big deal. So you have your sky, your lagoons, your open meadows with eventually a couple different shades of green because we are using a couple of different types of grasses to create some nice contrast along the mounds. You got everything, other than the fact that you are playing golf on it, that were primary criteria for the park that Olmsted envisioned, some of which got built.

If you look at Olmsted’s original design, he ignored the golf course. You won’t see a golf course in this design. Actually his lagoons were designed to come all the way around the front of the park. Before he finished his plans, the Commission leased this space to the golf club.

Q:  And he was fine with that?

DS: Well, he accepted it. I’m not sure how fine he was with it. He accepted it as reality.

Q: He had no choice.

DS: Right. He wasn’t running the park, he was just their hired designer.

Q: The grass that you are going to use, you have on the website as Eagle and Tip Bermuda.

DS: Yes, they are both Bermudas.

Q: What kind of care would those grasses require that this park hasn’t seen before? That too has been a big issue.

DS: It requires more fertilizer. But there are ways of dealing with properly. It will definitely be maintained to a higher level of quality than the old golf course. We are taking care of it more than we have before. And that primarily means more fertilizer. Exactly what that means, I’m not qualified to say. It’s no different than any other golf course in the world.

Q: I have looked up some information on these specific types of Bermuda grasses and their pests and infestations. One of them was dollar spot fungus, which was really big in warm and humid weather, so watch out, you might have a problem with that. The regimen that was recommended was three different kinds of fungicides used in rotation. And when you use these fungicides it lowers the natural resistance of the plants and that gives way to more infestations from other pests. You know how everything grows in New Orleans. So what are the plans on this? Has anything been established, other than more fertilizer?

DS: What we’ve done, is hired someone who starts next month. He’s the guy who’s currently at Timberlake Country Club. He’s got a degree and he’s been working for ten years. So what he’s going to do is come in along with golf course architect and his assistant, who is the guy who used to be in charge of the golf course here, and determine the regimen.

Q: So none of that has been established yet?

DS: Other than knowing that typical Bermuda grass requires more care.

Q: One of the major movements in golf is to make golf courses “green” or environmentally friendly. Has there been any work with golf ecology?

DS: That’s the first thing the guys going to do. There’s an organization that has criteria for environmentally appropriate actions for a golf course and that’s basically the first place that we are going to have the guy look. Whatever it is that develops, hopefully it takes into account those criteria.

Q: And who checks that? Who overlooks that?

DS: Me.

We are an environmental organization. It’s not like this is an area in which we are uncaring or ignorant. The specifics of this, with the golf course, we are not very knowledgeable about right now, but we will be. It will be consistent with all of our past actions, whether it’s maintaining the park like we have for the past 100 years or doing the stuff that we are doing with the research center, the species survival center, across the river or what we’re doing with aquarium or what we are doing out in the environment. We’ve got a stack of environmental and conservation programs this thick. So it’s an issue, but it’s the kind of issue that we are used to dealing with and have been dealing with for a long time. It’s not like we’re some other kind of organization.

Q: Lots of your opponents have drawn parallels between this and the expansion of the zoo in the 1970’s where there was a lot of public outcry and they didn’t feel that they had been properly asked and that the Audubon Commission was pushing beyond their limits of what they should be able to do, especially with the amusement park rides. Do you see any correlation between this and the zoo?

DS: I do see a correlation between this and zoo.; The neighbors and other people fought the zoo for 5 years, and they lost. The zoo got built. And you would probably be hard-pressed to find, other than one or two people, anybody that will admit that they didn’t want the zoo because it has been phenomenal. It has been an asset to the neighborhood, to the city, to Audubon, and is the basis for building the aquarium. They liked the zoo and they wanted to give us more money to build things like that. The same thing is going to happen with the golf course. A year after this thing opens, other than a handful of people, you are going to be hard-pressed to find anybody who will admit that they didn’t want this thing built because it is going to be an amazing asset to the whole community, including the park users and the neighbors. So yeah, I agree, I think that there is a very direct parallel between this and the zoo.

Q: Another thing that I am a little bit confused about is that Mr. Forman mentions in a letter to the editor in the Times-Picayune that is posted on your website that the Audubon Park receives no public money. But then I also know that some of the funding came, $2 million out of $18 million act passed for improvements to the Orleans Parish.

DS: Audubon Park receives no operational money. We get a lot of capital from the city, some of the state, some from the federal government, and some from private sources.

But the point being, unless we generate our own operating money, we have no money to maintain the park. So one of the reasons why we are doing the golf course is because we are generating operating monies, which will be put back into not only the golf course, but also the park, because the city doesn’t give us any money to cut the grass or pick up trash or clean the lagoons. It is my responsibility, really, to invest these capital monies to create operational monies.

Q: Another one of the huge issues is that your opponents say that this was not properly publicized and the Audubon Commission and Institute maintain that it was. What all did you do to publicize this?

DS: Well, I could get you a list. [He didn’t.] They said the same thing about the zoo, they said the same thing about the aquarium.

Whenever people don’t like what you are doing and they don’t have a rational to attack exactly what you are doing, then they attack how went about doing it. This project, like all of our other projects, has extensive public input from a variety of areas, some of which involve public hearings, some of which don’t. Nobody who is opposed to a project is ever going to say that you got sufficient public input, because they don’t like what you are did, so obviously you must have gone about doing it in the wrong way because you didn’t get the right result. You’re came to the wrong conclusion, you’re doing the wrong thing, because you didn’t think about it hard enough because you didn’t listen to the right people or you didn’t listen to anyone. So do some people want us to have done more? Sure. Would it have made the project any better? No. Did we go about it properly? Yes.

Q: There is a lot of confusion about what exactly is the Institute and its responsibilities and what exactly is the Commission and its responsibilities.

DS: Let me explain. The Audubon Park Commission, now called the Audubon Commission, is a governmental agency which gets its authority from a state act of the state legislature and from the city charter. Its responsibilities are to govern Audubon Park and other facilities, which is why it is no longer the Audubon Park Commission but the Audubon Commission. The Audubon Commission has contracted the Audubon Nature Institute, a non-profit organization, to operate its facilities. The Audubon Institute has a 28 member board. The Audubon Commission has a 24 member board. The Audubon Commissions members are appointed by the mayor; the Audubon Institute’s members are appointed by the members of the Audubon Nature Institute, who join because of the zoo or aquarium. The arrangement between the Commission and the Institute is modeled originally after the San Diego zoo. Now there are probably three dozen zoos and every major aquarium operated the same way. They are all operated by non-profits. A few of the non-profits actually own the facilities, but the vast majority operate facilities that are owned by the public. So that’s the arrangement. The Audubon Nature Institute is the operating entity of the Audubon Commission’s publicly owned facilities.