'Grandiose' Bobby Jones clubhouse design lands short of the green

More than a year ago, authorities cautiously approved moving the final piece of the restoration of the city-owned Bobby Jones Golf Club, the clubhouse, to the final design phase at an estimated $9.5 million. 

In Sept. 2024, then-City Attorney Robert Founier told commissioners may choose to reduce the scale of the clubhouse once there is a formal presentation and simultaneous with site plan approval. The commissioners voted unanimously to continue the matter to an uncertain date. 

That date was Nov. 1, 2025, and the final design of the clubhouse remains unsettled.

The 2024 decision came just after Tropical Storm Debby hit a few weeks earlier, impacting mostly areas outside the city limits.

Then came hurricanes Helene and Milton, and the tens of millions of dollars worth of damage, in large part to the city’s parks and other recreational spaces. 

Photo by Andrew Warfield

“The fund balance was depleted, projects have been pushed out, and those funding sources are used to repair mostly parks,” Parks and Recreation Director Jerry Fogle told the Sarasota City Commission Monday. “So obviously the city is in a different financial position than it was.”

Thus was the impetus for Fogle and staff to bring a one-story option especially now, another 15 months later, that the cost of the two-story clubhouse with a full-service restaurant and wrap-around elevated veranda has ballooned to $11.2 million. Add the fact that funding would have to be reallocated from other parks projects, including the adjacent Bobby Jones Nature Park, leaving four of the five commissioners with no appetite for a more country club experience.

Over the objections of Commissioner Liz Alpert, the board opted to pursue a new one-story clubhouse plan, which at an estimated $7.2 million with design work starting from scratch could eventually, Alpert warned, leave the city facing a cost similar to the 60% design phase estimate of the two-story building of $9.2 million.

“You're talking about at least another year to go through the process,” Alpert said. “A year from now, what's to say that the cost wouldn't be the same as doing a two-story right now that's already designed? If this had been done sooner, it could have been done for less. I don't see how we help ourselves by delaying it another year with prices continuing to go up.”

Brian Rhodes, regional director of operations of Troon Golf — the management company contracted by the city to operate Bobby Jones — told commissioners net revenue generated by a one-story clubhouse would exceed that of the two-story. The bigger the building, the more it costs to staff and operate.

The one-story plan will accommodate 60 to 70 for dining with outdoor seating under a temporary shelter for special events. Like the two-story building, the one-story clubhouse would offer the same standard features such as pro shop, offices, restrooms, etc., separated from a cart barn by a breezeway. 

Otherwise, the vision from Sept. 2024 of a two-story building with a large second-floor restaurant and elevated views over the golf course toward the nature park is no longer.

“I look at municipal golf course and a nature park, and I don't see in my mind a grandiose two-story golf clubhouse as being appropriate for that type of situation,” said Mayor Debbie Trice.

Vice Mayor Kathy Kelley Ohlrich and Commissioner Kyle Battie agreed that through their interactions with golfers at Bobby Jones — Ohlrich refers to the complex as being in her “back yard” — rarely broached is the topic of the clubhouse, which is currently a triple-wide trailer. 

For Commissioner Jen Ahearn-Koch, her motion to pursue the one-story design is based on prudence and preserving Park and Recreation Department funds.

“The parks department suffers far too often from sticking hands in their funds and using it for other things,” she said. “This is not something that I'm in favor of doing.”

Alpert, meanwhile, fell short of convincing her colleagues that the two-story clubhouse is the better business decision.

“I don't think this is the fiscally responsible thing to do,” she said. “Yes, it's a municipal course, but why the old clubhouse was such a failure is because it was just simple. It was basic and it sat there and languished and lost money. I think this is a total mistake to do this.”

Following the vote to pursue the single-story clubhouse, commissioners voted 4-1, again with Alpert opposed, to deny the site plan application for the two-story building.