Reality Check.

Save Audubon Park

Home

The $6 Million Plan

Chronology

Viewpoints

Protest and Survive

Competitions

Site Map

Featured Haiku

Build me a clubhouse
Where Historic oaks once stood...
Wonders of Nature?
s.a.p.

More...

Reality Check

Interview with Dale Stastny
Some observations on the many curious claims made by Dale Stastny in his interview with Renee Sutton.

New Definition for "Restaurant"?

"The zoning ordinance specifically defines what a restaurant is. Primarily what it is, is a building that gets about half its revenues from selling food. Well, we’re going to get about 3% of our revenues from selling food because it’s a clubhouse. It sells tickets to the golf course, it rents carts, it sells stuff in the pro shop, and it provides a food service."

We are unable to identify exactly which document defines a restaurant in this way. According to our research, the defining feature of a restaurant is the existence of kitchen and dining areas and the serving of food and beverages - the percentage of revenue for the establishment generated by the food service has nothing to do with it.

In any case, the arbitrary "3% of revenue" quoted by Stastny is only arrived at by including green fees and cart-rental as being the revenue of the clubhouse rather, than more logically the revenue of the course itself. If collection of green-fees and cart-rental monies were the true purpose of the clubhouse, what proportion of the 7,900 square feet of the new building would really be needed (perhaps 3 percent?)

We argue that the true purpose of the clubhouse is to act as a revenue-generating rental facility both for golf tournaments and for unrelated evening functions... a "junior tea-room" if you will.

More Olmsted than Olmsted?

[The new golf course is more like Olmsted's design because] "the three things that Olmsted talked about when he addressed the [Audubon Park] Commission is oak trees, rolling meadows, and lagoons."

Audubon has for some time been attempting to hijack the Olmsted name in defence of their project.

In this particular instance Mr. Stastny appears to argue that the cutting down of trees on the course is an Olmstedian feat because it improves the visibility of the oak grove from across the golf course - when in fact, if Audubon had had its way, the new clubhouse would have stood between the oak grove and the course, entirely ruining the view!

Furthermore, while the rolling meadows and lagoons constructed on the new course may or may not be more scenic to Olmsted's eyes, the fact remains that the public will no longer be allowed onto the Linear Park along the golf-course side of the lagoon, and only allowed onto Hurst Walk in some limited way (see below).

Given these restriction of public access, the lagoons in particular will not be of much visual benefit to the public. Olmsted's vision was of a natural, semi-rural "meadow" which will now contain not just sand-traps, man-made hills and lagoons, but also white concrete cart-paths and the distinctly bucolic pleasure of reading Audubon's legal warning signs before setting off for a walk across your own public park.

Stastny also omits to quote John Charles Olmsted who considered the placement of large structures in Audubon Park to be "utterly inappropriate and often ruinous". What would he therefore have made of the new clubhouse?

Stastny's blithe assurances to the contrary, Suzanne Turner - Professor Emerita of Landscape Architecture at LSU - has written

"To allow the Audubon Institute to deliberately ignore Olmsted's master plan and willfully eradicate key components of this design is a tragic error... These plans defy logic, and are in John Charles Olmsted's words, "a shocking waste and extravagance."

No walk in the park

"If you look at the aerial photo, people walk on the golf course here. They’ve been walking on the golf course admittedly since the golf course was first built. But things have changed from a liability standpoint. Whether we should have been allowing people to walk on the golf course a year ago is kind of irrelevant. But we can’t, from a legal standpoint, allow people to walk on the golf course while it’s being used. We can work out something on the Hurst walk to allow access under certain conditions with certain sign-ins [sic? signage?]. We haven’t quite figured out how to do that. But the linear park concept is because some people have been walking on the golf course for some time. It is not a linear park, it’s a golf course. The linear park is over here [outside of the lagoon]. If people want to walk along the lagoon, they have the whole park side to walk on. This is the golf course. And this part is a hole, it always has been, and is not park."

Mr Stastny is right when he says that people have always walked on the golf course, both on Hurst Walk and along the inside of the lagoon. Since no one was ever hit by a golf ball in 100 years of coexistence of the Hurst Walk and the old golf course, we reiterate our request that the golf course design should be adjusted so that liability does not become a convenient excuse for the loss of this public right-of-way.

This review of the issue also reveals a disturbing viewpoint with regard to the public's rights within Audubon Park. According to Stastny, 100 years of precedent to the contrary, the public has no right of way along the lagoon on the golf course side of the park. In this view, rather than the golf course occupying part of the park and co-existing with general park usage, the Audubon Institute has redefined Audubon Park as a "linear park" surrounding a golf course, and any public activity that conflicts with the demands of the golf course is curtailed.

How long before the jogging track is closed because of "liability"?

How can this not be an "expansion" of the golf course?

Sign of the times?

"The Meditation Walk was [only] a sign... If you can figure out where a beautiful meditation walk is, more power to you."

Meditation Walk was created as a gravel path lined with flowering shrubs which led to the Heymann Conservatory. The Audubon Institute closed the Conservatory in 1994, citing lack of funds. Since that time, Meditation Walk and the Conservatory fell into Institute-style disrepair. In 2001, the Institute finished what it started, demolishing the Heymann Conservatory. The new and "improved" Meditation Walk will now lead from the jogging track to the new golf course parking lot - quite what one is supposed to be "meditating" about along the way is unclear.

What kind of organization do you think we are?

"We are an environmental organization. It’s not like this [golf course ecology] is an area in which we are uncaring or ignorant. ... It’s not like we’re some other kind of organization."

We believe that Audubon is very much "some other kind of organization" - specifically a property developer with a unique ability to spend public money removing public land from public use.

Also, with regard to Audubon's credentials as an "environmental organization", we agree with Renee Sutton who writes in her piece "A Brief History of Everything"

"The Audubon Institute has a long history of mutual back-scratching with oil and land development companies and a track record that is sometimes not so becoming to an "environmentalist, conservationist" organization. The Audubon Institute has long been a member of the National Wetlands Coalition, whose name sounds benign and rather like a conservation organization. This is the organization of mostly oil companies and land-developers (with the sole exception of the Audubon Institute) that is dedicated to the rolling back of wetlands protection policies in favor of wetlands exploration. They drafted and sponsored the Shuster Bill, nicknamed the Dirty Water Bill, in 1995. This bill aimed to take away the oversight of the EPA awarded in the Clean Water Act. Leighton Steward, CEO of Louisiana Land & Exploration Company, is a founding member of this group. It is the states’ largest landowner with nearly 1,000 square miles of coastal Louisiana in its name and environmental regulations imposed by the federal government cause financial loss to the corporation. This is group is in favor of reducing the Clean Water Act and the federal protection of endangered species. "

With friends like these, the environment really doesn't need enemies.

For more about ANI's environmental bona-fides, click here

Operation Enduring Construction

"Audubon Park receives no operational money. We get a lot of capital from the city, some from the state, some from the federal government, and some from private sources."
"But the point being, unless we generate our own operating money, we have no money to maintain the park. So one of the reasons why we are doing the golf course is because we are generating operating monies, which will be put back into not only the golf course, but also the park..."

Despite the fact that the voters of New Orleans recently approved almost 2 million dollars for "repairs, maintenance and improvements in Audubon park", the ANI is fond of justifying this huge and costly project in terms of the "operational revenue" that the new course will generate, which will supposedly be spent on the rest of the park.

However, one has to ask: if the zoo with its 1 million annual visitors does not generate enough revenue to cut the grass in Audubon Park, how will the relatively minute income of the golf course help?

What guarantees do we have that any of the profits from the course will be spent on the public areas of the park?

Given the decrepit state of the Hyam's Fountain, which has fallen into disrepair since the Institute was prevented from enclosing it within the zoo, hasn't the Institute demonstrated a tendency to only maintain "its" facilities and to ignore non-revenue-generating parts of the park? (The plight of the Conservatory, Meditation Walk, various shelters and benches, and many of the park's trees come immediately to mind.)

Daddy knows best

"This project, like all of our other projects, has extensive public input from a variety of areas, some of which involve public hearings, some of which don’t."
"So do some people want us to have done more? Sure. Would it have made the project any better? No. Did we go about it properly? Yes."

We strongly disagree with Mr. Stastny that there was "extensive public input" and that more public input would not have made the project better.

The plan, as it stood when construction began, and before the meetings and modifications forced upon the Institute by the public reaction, included a 20-foot wide asphalt road through the oak grove, the construction of an even larger clubhouse, and the placement of 5,500 square feet of cart-rental facilities within the oak grove itself. And the permanent closure, indeed erasure, of Hurst Walk.

We believe that if the Institute had held public meetings to fully reveal and openly discuss its plan before construction began, we would have had a much better and more publicly-supported renovation of the golf course, with far fewer invasive and unwanted features.

Email us at SaveAudubonPark@yahoo.com

All content is copyright and cannot be reproduced in whole or in part without twinges of guilt