City may dust off plan for flood-prone Jones Golf Course

CEDAR RAPIDS — Last year's fresh local idea in golfing may not yet have lost its luster.

Lisa Miller, the city's golf director, on Monday said she thought the city should look anew at a plan proposed a year ago to transform the city's oft-flooded-and-now-flood-damaged Jones Golf Course from an 18-hole course to a 9-hole one with a short training academy course and new driving range.

'My personal feeling' is that the course transformation plan proposed in 2013 should be revisited, Miller said.

'Because this is becoming so frequent,' she said. '… We know it's going to happen again.'

Last July, Sven Leff, who took over as the city's parks and recreation director in April 2013, and Miller worked to sell their new Jones Golf Course plan to the local golfing community, but in the end, Leff decided to keep the course as it is after he said 60 percent of respondents said they didn't want a change.

Leff's decision came even though the flood-prone back nine of the Jones course, one of four city-owned courses, was closed for much of the 2013 season after three rounds of flooding from Prairie Creek.

Prairie Creek now has acted up again, and on June 23, a second round of creek flooding this year closed the Jones course once again for an indefinite period.

Miller on Monday said the course's greens survived the recent flooding as did the clubhouse, but the course's back nine tees, fairways and roughs will need to be rebuilt again while damage to four front-nine holes is currently being assessed, she said.

The city spent more than $1 million in 2001 to expand the court from nine to 18 holes with elevated greens with the thought that the course along Prairie Creek might flood a bit every five or six years.

'But when it's every year,' Miller said.

She said the city's four-course golf operation overall loses revenue and customers when the Jones course must close due to flooding. About one third of the golf rounds that would have been played at Jones last year were not played at other city courses when Jones was closed, she said.

The back nine at Jones will not reopen this year, Miller said. The front nine likely will open in a few weeks, but a few of the holes likely will be shortened because of flood damage to them, she said.

The cost to reseed and fertilize the damaged course will cost about $13,000 to reopen the course as an 18-hole one next year. The cost to transform the course as a 9-hole one with training academy would be about the same, although there would be an additional one-time cost to buffer parts of the front nine from creek flooding, she said.

Miller said the initial reaction to the latest flood-caused closing of Jones is 'split.' Some golfers think the city should dust off its plan to convert the course; some wondered why the city hadn't moved ahead with the plan; and others want the course to remain as it has been, she said.

Miller said she will huddle with Leff, who just returned from vacation on Monday, and see what might come next for the Jones course.

'We'll see what the climate is,' she said.