The city of Minneapolis, Minnesota, whose seven golf courses have been ailing since the onset of the Great Recession, has hired a consultant to diagnose the trouble and, hopefully, find a cure.
Don’t expect a miracle, though. Like other municipalities, Minneapolis is stuck between the proverbial rock and a hard place. Its courses need costly capital improvements but no longer generate the income to pay for them.
“It’s long overdue,” the superintendent of the city’s park board said of the operations audit being conducted by Jim Keegan. “We’ve not invested in the golf courses. We haven’t changed who we’ve served.”
Keegan, of Castle Rock, Colorado-based Golf Convergence, has already identified one major problem. Golf, he told the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, ranks 15th on local residents’ favorite recreational activities.
