Hugo Chavez dismisses golf as a “bourgeois sport” incompatible with his vision of a socialist utopia. Chavez has some fellow travelers here in Charlottesville, Virginia, where the city’s political class has targeted a small but popular golf course as an impediment to the region’s newest potential “crown jewel” – a taxpayer-subsidized botanical garden.
In 1938, a nine-hole public golf course opened in Charlottesville’s McIntire Park. The New Deal-era Works Progress Administration and a local businessmen’s club financed the $11,000 construction costs. The course uses compacted sand for its “greens,” eliminating the need for expensive irrigation and landscaping systems. Voluntary fees – $5 to play all day, paid on the honor system – more then cover the course’s maintenance. Indeed, the McIntire Golf Course is the only Charlottesville city park that is financially self-sustaining.
Given its low cost, the McIntire Golf Course is accessible to all elements of the community, including children, the elderly, and low-income families. Approximately 4,000 paid rounds are played at the course every year. The nonprofit First Tee Foundation also operates a highly successful educational program for children using the McIntire course. (For more on the course and its users, see this video prepared by the Save McIntire Golf Committee.)
But despite its popularity with the people of Charlottesville, the McIntire Golf Course has never been liked by the city’s all-Democratic political class. The problem is simple: The voluntary, self-supporting community that uses the golf course generates no political benefits for these self-appointed “civic leaders.” As far back as the 1970s, city planners slated the McIntire Golf Course for destruction; thankfully, the political class’s inability to formulate an acceptable “master plan” for McIntire Park has kept the course open and thriving for the past four decades.
Enter a new group called McIntire Botanical Garden. As the name implies, this nonprofit organization wants to construct a botanical garden – and the only location acceptable to MBG is the existing golf course. (Interestingly, a competing botanical nonprofit suggests there are at least two other acceptable sites.) MBG claims it is not in competition with the golfers, yet simultaneously insists there’s no way for a botanical garden and golf course to coexist within McIntire Park. One MBG member snidely told a local paper recently, “My idea of a botanical garden is inconsistent with people hitting golf balls . . . McIntire should be a botanical garden.”
Like most political rent-seekers, MBG is full of “vision” and empty on details. On August 28, MBG hosted a presentation by landscape designer Warren Byrd, where he primarily discussed botanical gardens in other cities and why it was a wonderful concept for Charlottesville. He steadfastly refused to offer any specifics about MBG. Byrd also denied any personal financial interest in the project, though later that day he told the Charlottesville Daily Progress that his firm would, in fact, be interested in winning the contract to design the hypothetical garden, which he estimated would cost up to $250,000.
MBG has already misled the public on the critical question of how to pay for the botanical garden. Initially, MBG president Helen Flamini said all of the necessary funds would be raised privately. But at a recent Charlottesville City Council meeting, Flamini reversed herself and said “public” funds would be necessary. Of course, since MBG doesn’t have a plan – or even a timetable for presenting a plan – there’s no way to know how much money will even be required. But that’s not terribly important at the moment since MBG has political allies, notably Charlottesville Mayor Dave Norris, who will ovesee a new “master planning process” for McIntire Park later this year.
We all know this song-and-dance number: A nominally private group proposes a “partnership” with the local government to build a facility. The city leadership commits itself to the project without vetting the details carefully. When the private group suddenly realizes it can’t meet its fundraising goals, the city uses taxpayer dollars to bail out the project. The private group gets its facility, the city leaders take credit for getting the project done, and the taxpayers are stuck with the bill.
Indeed, this already happened in another part of McIntire Park. Mayor Norris and the City Council previously approved a 40-year lease for a large portion of western McIntire Park to the Piedmont Family YMCA so it can construct a new facility on “public” land. The lease was approved without a financial plan from the YMCA – a violation of the city’s own “best practices” – and there’s no timetable for construction to begin, assuming the YMCA can even raise the funds.
MBG’s counterargument is that a botanical garden would serve the public far better than the existing golf course. Mayor Norris has latched onto this point, telling one golf course supporter recently that “only a tiny number of residents ever enjoyed [McIntire] park because so much of it was reserved for golfing.” This is the constant refrain from MBG supporters: A small cadre of golfers are actively preventing the larger community from enjoying McIntire Park. Yet there’s no empirical evidence of this. There’s no grassroots uprising for a botanical garden, nor have there been protests against the “elitist” golf course from anyone outside of MBG.
What MBG and Norris are really appealing to is upper-class resentment against low-cost recreation. Somehow, a valuable piece of “public” property has fallen into the hands of a community with no political organization, no patronage operation, and no desire to play the “master planning” game controlled by the likes of Dave Norris. This will not stand.
There are a couple ways to look at this situation if you’re a libertarian. You could throw up your hands and say, “The city should just sell McIntire Park outright to whoever offers the highest bid, the golfers or the garden,” or you could look at the McIntire Golf Course and say it’s already been privatized through homesteading. The city might have a deed for the underlying land – itself a gift from Paul McIntire – but it did not pay for the course’s construction, it’s not paying for the current upkeep, and given the 40-year record of city leaders opposing the course, the city has clearly abandoned any claims to the property. As Walter Block observed in his recent book on the privatization of “public” roads:
A modicum of entitlement is automatically captured by those who “mix their labor” with an unowned (or in this case, illegitimately or improperly owned–by the state) piece of property. Thus, all of those who have traveled on the street by that token alone thereby obtain a claim of ownership over it.
The golfers who pay for and use the McIntire Park course are its rightful owners, not Dave Norris and the members of the political class who want to build a monument to their own authority in the form of a botanical garden. It’s not a question of whether the golf course is a “better” use of the land then a botanical garden; it’s a matter or respecting a group that has taken the time and effort to “mix their labor” with the land.
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The owner of the property should be able to do what he wants, within the rule of law.
The rule of law may need changing and there are ways to go about that.
LOL, so the Democratic politicians of this city are dissing a WPA project? The legacy of the “great” FDR? Heh, usually Democrats piss themselves if they hear someone cast aspersions on something done by their Great White Father.
Skip,
I see the point you’re making and agree with the auction idea and there is some saliency to your homesteading argument but be careful… I wouldn’t be surprised if a George Reisman or Stephen Kinsella-type might drop by and point out that you’re sounding a bit like Kevin Carson and the mutualists.
The rule of law has been violated, according to the VA Constitution a super majority is necessary to rent the park for 40 years. The destruction of the two shelters because of their openness and privacy can never be adequately replaced. Roads leading to the shelters allow handicap and event planning will be lost when and if new shelters are built. Yet taxpayers will be bound to the success of this YMCA despite the fact only three percent of the residents will use it.
So a cheap public course is elitist, but a botanical gardens is good for the common people? I’m glad I’m not a communist. I’d never be able to keep up with the rules.
So a cheap public course is elitist, but a botanical gardens is good for the common people? I’m glad I’m not a communist. I’d never be able to keep up with the rules.
Looky here, Mr. Oliva, as every old country boy knows, when the cows need to be milked, you milk ‘em. And when the sun shines you make hay. And weren’t July the most delicious summer month in recent memory? And look what happened to it! It got asphyxiated in the heat and humidity of August. Things is always changing. So it is with this piece of public land that’s been a golf course for 70 years. You got some want to keep it that way, and some want to change it to a botanical garden. Not much else to do except pull up a chair and watch the clowns whack each other, have a few laughs, and commiserate with the taxpayers who just wished their government would spend their money on something worthwhile. The “right” people is what they want.
I’ve lived around Charlottesville for 40 years. And what Mr. Oliva describes reminds me of something akin to the eternal recurrence or the wheel of life, destined to be repeated by people of succeeding generations, unless by fortuitous circumstances, luck and sound thinking they liberate themselves from their divisive and destructive ways. I’ve seen it all before and been apart of it.
I don’t think it’s accurate to say that this is happening because of the garden proposal.
The golf course is being designated as underutilized as part of the justification for the McIntire Road extension project that runs right through the golf course at McIntire Park, and the 250 interchange that goes with it. More info here:
http://kleemanblog.blogspot.com/2009/09/route-250-bypass-interchange-at.html
It’s probably safer to say that most Charlottesville residents see this as a road vs. park issue first.
Also the city has recently been ripping out pools (which were sorely in need of maintenance) from smaller neighborhood parks in favor of one large pool at Washington Park. The last year before this happened the pool hours at Forest Hills Park were changed (greatly reduced), which resulted in lower utilization; which in turn was part of the justification for removal.
The city manager’s argument is that one large pool is cheaper to maintain than a half dozen smaller ones, but now that I’ll have to drive to the pool rather than walk we will go to private pools.
Egh… the media is so hard on chavez. I think that even though we Austrians oppose socialism we ought to give venezuala a break for several reasons
a) There are many other leaders in the world who do worse or more ridiculous things.
B) Austrians don’t agree that it is okay to confiscate property, but it is BA to confiscate it from corrupt elites who maintained their ownership by force while others starved.
Venezuelan elites would sell oil at below market prices to America in exchange for keeping them in power. Chavez sells it to us at the market price, which is why the media rips on him all the time.
C) Austrians will point out that Chavez’s price controls caused numerous food and drug shortages. This is bad but I do not think it is malicious. We should fear politicians who are self serving and corrupt before we fear those who are just misled.
D) Chavez’s experience with capitalism is in the form of multinational corporations trying to take over Venezuala’s natural resources threatening to use force and embargos, claiming that Venezuala is violating free trade agreements and the like. No wonder he is socialist.
The enemy of my enemy is a necessary but not sufficient condition for being my friend. But if he’s going to try to stick it to uncle sam and the elites of his country who watched the masses starve for decades, then I’m at least rooting for him.
so you hate golf, too, blitzkreig?
egh, if the golf courses were privately owned, within the context of venezuala’s history, the owner probably owes his wealth to acts of government extortion.
Kind of hard to determine who “actually” owns what any time the state allocates and re-allocates resources over and over again.
Still opposed to socialism. Just think distribution of goods is hard to reverse in the best of cases.
First of all, thank you for acknowledging that the course has been slated for retirement since the 1970′s. Many people are misled into thinking that the botanical garden proposal is the reason the course is being retired, which is entirely false. The truth is that the Penn Park course was built to replace it, and the indecision about the parkway postponed that from happening yet (see Ed Zavada’s excellent comment).
Now as to so called “class warfare”, I think you’ve got it backwards. I distinctly remember when there were NO minorities at local country clubs, and golf was anything but a diverse sport. Saying that you should save the golf course for the disadvantaged of Charlottesville is ironic indeed, especially when for many years blacks were not allowed to use it. So I’ll call that bluff right now… If we care so much about minorities, children and the poor being able to play golf then lets reduce the fees at Penn Park and get more people playing there? After all, that too is a public park and should be available and accessible to ALL the golf playing taxpayers. The absense of that argument by Mcintire park golfers reveals that their motive has nothing to do with accessibility and everything to do with exclusivity, For that matter, if we are keeping McIntire then shouldn’t we shut down Penn Park’s course since it is no longer needed?
If you attended the presentation about the botanical garden then you’d know that the plan involves making the vast majority of the park free and open to the public for activities such a walking, picnicing etc. I see nothing exclusive in those goals. Besides, really this comes down to whether one believes in democracy or not. The golfers appear to be against a democratic master planning process. The botanical garden advocates, including myself, have always supported an open and democratic process even if the results don’t end up in our favor.
Lastly, the wading pool and golf course will not be able to coexist after the Parkway is built, especially since there will be no access to the pool except by crossing the course. So, which use do we keep? Pretending we can keep both is just a lack of wise planning, and a shallow attempt to block the parkway.
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