Switch Blades

Progress on the Monticello layout meant a sod bonanza for local residents and new hope for Tony Wojcik, whose earlier dreams failed.

By Hal Phillips

Nothing catches the fancy of a high desert community quite like the prospect of free sod.

Daylen Construction Co., the Fresno, Calif.-based firm building Monticello’s new municipal golf course, came to this realization in April. When word got out that the city’s existing nine-hole layout, Blue Mountain Meadows Golf Course, was going under the knife - to make way for the new 18 -folks from all over San Juan County lined up their pickup trucks to haul away acres of surplus sod.

“The old No. 4 tee box is in my backyard now,” says Tony Wojcik, of neighboring Blanding, Utah. “I was going to get a green, but that’s too high maintenance.”

It’s difficult for most of us to understand just how prized a patch of green lawn can be here on the arid Colorado Plateau. “You might want to grow a lawn,” Wojcik explains, “but it takes a lot of water to get one established. Bottom line: If folks can get sod, they don’t have to spend so much on water.”

The old nine at Blue Mountain Meadows was nothing if not a sod-cutters’ paradise: 50 to 60 acres of wall-to-wall bluegrass, some 35 of which were stripped and carted away for the reasonable sum of $50 per payload. Daylen coordinated The Great Bluegrass Giveaway of 2001, though it didn’t collect any money. Those proceeds went to the local contractor who supplied the sod cutter.

“I’ll have you know there is now a lawn at the airport - and at a motel in Bluff [Utah] 50 miles away,” reports Daylen President Dale Siemens. “We figure that saving and reusing sod isn’t worth it; we’ve found it’s best to buy new sod for our projects. I’m glad that the

locals made good use of the old sod.”

Wojcik was one of the many locals who snapped it up - but then he has an emotional stake in the property: Wojcik played his golf at Blue Mountain Meadows, driving 25 miles each way for the privilege. He’s an art teacher at Blanding’s San Juan High School; he’s also the longtime golf coach there and his kids practiced and played some matches at Monticello’s old nine.

Wojcik also serves as the Blanding representative on Monticello’s Golf Committee, the volunteer body which oversees city golf matters - the largest of which is, obviously, the 18 holes now being constructed west of Highway 191.

For all these reasons, it’s safe to say that no one in all of Southeastern Utah is more excited about the new course than Tony Wojcik.

There’s one more reason: In the early 1990s, Wojcik tried in vain to develop a new, community-owned course in Blanding. After a promising start, his plans met a brick wall of public sentiment, the fallout from which he’s still living down.

“We were pretty close to getting it done,” Wojcik recalls. “I did a lot of leg work on that [Blanding] project, a lot of research and revenue projections. I talked to six different comparable course operations and got all the figures: cart prices, what they paid their pros, rounds played, maintenance bills É We hired an architect. The city council actually purchased some property. We got all the way to the stage of having blueprints ready to build.

“But the minority in town who didn’t want the course ended up being much more vocal than the majority who did want it. And that was the end of it.”

Undaunted, Wojcik got involved in Monticello’s golf course dreams. Wojcik had little trouble redirecting his energies; after all, he’s been playing his golf in Monticello for 28 years.

“That’s why it’s so exciting to see all this coming to fruition after all this time,” he says. “It took us nearly 40 years to get a restroom on that old course - and now we’re tearing it down!”

Wojcik, 54, claims no visionary mantle. But he was clearly on the golf bandwagon long before Tiger Woods began clobbering other sports in the Nielsen ratings.

“I could see golf was growing in popularity, even back in the 1980s,” he claims. “You should know that the economic climate here is very boom-bust. Mining would boom, then it would bust. Uranium: boom, then bust. My idea has always been to find something that would provide steady income. So back in 1990, we saw golf as a potential boost to our economy around here. Everyone can play, from 8 years old to 80. I’ve seen roller skating rinks and bowling alleys come and go, but golf came here in the 1950s - and it’s still here.”

Blue Mountain Meadows was built by local, volunteer labor in 1960. A few years later, a group of Blanding golfers roughed out their own seven-hole course, which survives to this day on its meager, 20-acre footprint. It’s a modest affair, the Blanding loop; what they call a sage brush course here in the West.

“It’s a local amenity,” Wojcik explains. “The greens weren’t built to spec so they’re tough to maintain. It’s short. Fairways overlap ... But it’s all we’ve got.”

Despite their humble facilities, Blanding residents like their golf. Monticello City Manager Trent Schafer can appreciate the stout support Blanding residents have lent to Blue Mountain Meadows over the years: seven of 10 regular golfers at the old Monticello course hailed from Blanding, Schafer says. In fact, he notes, there are more golfers in Blanding (pop. 3,500) than in Monticello (2,200), both in raw numbers and as percentage of population. Recognizing this level of interest 10 years ago, Wojcik attempted to accommodate it - in Blanding.

The bust of the uranium industry on the Colorado Plateau has twice served as a catalyst for golf development in southeastern Utah. In the spring of 1999, Monticello and the U.S. Department of Energy struck a deal: In exchange for $6.5 million, the city agreed to complete DOE’s final-stage remediation of a former mill site in Monticello, where the federal government processed uranium and vanadium from 1941 to 1960.

The money left over is funding the new 18-hole course across the street.

In the early 1990s, Blanding’s course development campaign was fueled by the prospect of a $600,000 grant from the State of Utah, which levies a surcharge on commodities extracted from the state’s mineral-rich soil. Those funds are earmarked for redistribution, through the state’s Community Impact Board (CIB), to various cities and towns - ideally to those Utah communities most impacted by the mining industry.

With help from State Senator Mike Dmitrich, who represents Monticello and Blanding, Wojcik and his colleagues had “tentatively lined up” this $600,000 from the CIB to build its course.

“Our grand total estimate for building the course was $850,000, so we had to come up with 250 grand to make it happen,” Wojcik recalls. “I was confident we could have secured that 250 grand from the CIB with a low-interest loan. We just had to come and seek it. Do the paperwork, jump through the hoops, blow the bells and whistles.”

It was here that Blanding’s pro-course movement lost control of that elusive, much-sought commodity - what the English philosopher David Hume first recognized as public “opinion.” Without it, governments lose their authority and influence, their sway; without it, grass roots movements lose their momentum.

“All of a sudden, the negativism began coming out of the woodwork, and to a certain extent I bore the brunt of this disgust,” Wojcik says. “The old guard here, the ranchers and farmers who settled this place, said ‘We’re not going to build a golf course so that 50 people can play it!’ “

Blanding and Monticello are in San Juan County, 96 percent of which is tied up in federal and state lands. As a result, the locals with private land ownership - business owners, ranchers, farmers - wield an extraordinary amount of influence. They were not on the golf band- wagon in Blanding, and what support the course had generated soon evaporated.

“They didn’t see the tax implications, the tourist implications, the value of recreation,” says Wojcik. “This is an ultra-conservative community, and they didn’t want to go into debt, either. You start talking taxes down here and it’s like political dynamite.”

Some of which blew up in his face. “I became somewhat ostracized. People would see me in the store and say, ‘My taxes are going to go up because you want to build a golf course?’

“Here’s an example: We had 115 acres or so earmarked for the course and everyone wanted to know how much water we’d need to treat 115 acres. I tried to tell them that we would only irrigate 75 acres or so - but that didn’t fly, coming from me. Some guy would compare it to putting down 75 acres of alfalfa. That was the way they thought about it: We could be growing alfalfa.”

Looking back on the ill-fated Blanding project, Wojcik knows where it went wrong: He did all the research himself. So, when revenue projections were presented, they came from that golf nut/art teacher at San Juan High - not an expert. Not someone with third-party credibility.

In Monticello, Wojcik was determined that he and his Golf Committee colleagues secure the proper professional authority. The city’s $6.5 million in federal funding made this possible.

“It boils down to money and doing things right,” he says. “It means having the public meetings and gathering input up front. It means hiring third parties to gather and present information on where revenues will come from and how they will be allocated, in a way that will be understood -and believed!”

Wojcik recalls discussing the hiring of a course architect in Monticello, “and there were folks who felt we could do that sort of thing ourselves. I looked at them and I said, ‘No, we can’t do that. We have to hire qualified people to do the job.’ You spend a day on site with these guys and you realize there’s no way that us locals could have built this golf course, a course good enough to hold amateur tournaments, a course good enough to attract traveling golfers.”

Monticello’s hiring of qualified personnel wasn’t limited to course architecture and construction. The city invested in a recreation consultant, Phoenix-based Leisure Time Industries, to determine the size and scope of its clubhouse needs. Through its course architect, Phoenix-based Golf Group Ltd., the city retained the services of civil engineer Frank Protiva.

Recently, Monticello began its search for a golf professional. Schafer, the city manager, had solicited the help of Jeff Beaudry, the PGA of America’s representative in Utah. “The PGA actually puts together a package for this type of thing, the PGA Career Links program; without that sort of assistance, we’d be lost,” Schafer says. “They recently helped another community in the northeastern part of Utah get a pro, and they ended up getting 28 applicants. We’re very confident that we can do the same down here.”

The point’s been made many times, but it bears repeating: Monticello’s federal dollars made the hiring of outside experts a no-brainer. Similar-sized communities might find it difficult to secure funding for this sort of out-sourced, pre-development research. Yet Wojcik will attest to the importance of finding and spending that money - the project’s ultimate viability may well depend on it.

Indeed, this summer’s bustle of activity in Monticello - the impromptu Bluegrass Giveaway notwithstanding - is an ongoing testament to the value of up front planning and spending.

“I’ve never seen a golf course take shape from the ground up; it’s an incredible process,” Schafer reported in June. “The holes have been shaped and the irrigation is being plugged in. The access road leading to the housing development got going in May. It’s a very exciting time around here.”

Wojcik couldn’t agree more.