As you may or may not heard, the city is considering new contractors to manage our city courses. It’s been a forgone conclusion that GreatLife will probably scoop up the contract simply because of the influence of it’s Whopper of a Founder, Tom Walsh.
I could care less. I don’t golf, use fitness centers, bowl or watch movies outside my home. As long as the next contractor can make the city some money from the courses, I’m happy.
But for a moment, let’s pretend that decision to pick GreatLife or Dakota Golf (again) was on the up and up. Who get’s to make the preliminary decision and pass the flaming football to council? Oh, the Parks board;
Following the calendar provided in the city’s official request for proposals, the park board’s committee set up to facilitate the process has been discussing the bids. Additional interviews with contending firms would take place Sept. 27-28, with “notification of conditional award†taking place Sept. 29.
I guess just reviewing all the proposals and bids and making a conditional award isn’t really that major of a decision. Remember when the Southside Snobs told the council during the debate over districting the parks board that ALL the major decisions were up to the council. Than why isn’t the council reviewing this RFP’s in a land use committee instead of letting a bunch of ‘unimportant’ volunteer board members do it?
Make no mistake, the Parks Board has a gob of power that they use under the direction of the Chief Lawn-mowing-Liar of the City, Parks Director Don Kearney.
Hopefully the next council will pass the Parks Board Districting ordinance. I would also make it go into affect within 4 years.
You don’t bowl? Things are starting to make more sense.
Every two years, when Eide Bailly does the audit on Dakota Golf Management, Inc., they receive the same audit finding: Segregation of Duties.
This has been an ongoing issue because they do not employ enough staff to properly account for the flow of revenue and expenses. The same issue happens at Great Bear.
This audit finding would be resolved by switching to Great Life.
The AL brought up an interesting point today. Those golfers who currently patronize the 3 public courses managed by Dakota Golf do not want the boat rocked. They want to protect their ‘territory’ and not have hordes of golfers from Great Life playing on ‘their’ courses.
These golf courses are owned by the taxpayers, folks, they are public golf courses!
Everything about Dakota Golf feels like a fraternity and that’s exactly how the management and Dakota Golf loyal like it.
The decision on who should manage these courses should come down to a few factors:
1 – profitability. The city should continue to make money on them and not have to constantly pump more money into them.
2 – affordability. Golf isn’t exactly a cheap sport, but that doesn’t mean that rounds and memberships have to be out of reach to the average person.
3 – stewardship. Who is going to be a good steward of this city owned property? I think this should be a qualification for all organizations that use and manage city owned property. I don’t believe for a second that Dakota Golf has been a good steward of this land. This same level of stewardship should apply to all baseball, softball, soccer, tennis facilities.