Winnipeg Free Press

Winnipeg Free Press (Newspaper) - July 25, 2015, Winnipeg, Manitoba C M Y K PAGE A13 winnipegfreepress. com MANITOBA WINNIPEG FREE PRESS, SATURDAY, JULY 25, 2015 A 13 R E A D E R O F F E R | M I N D G A M E S P U Z Z L E B O O K winnipegfreepress. com / subscribe- new/ Call: 204- 697- 7001 | 1- 800- 542- 8900 Email: fpcirc@ winnipegfreepress. com STAY SHARP this SUMMER Time to find a place to relax, put up your feet and challenge yourself with our 40- page weekly puzzle book. CROSSWORDS SUDOKU WORD SLEUTH SCRABBLE CALCUDOKU JUMBLE HIDATO BANANAGRAMS AND MORE MIND GAMES * If you are a 6- day Winnipeg Free Press subscriber. Rates vary. MIND a publication from the SUBSCRIBE TODAY! $ 1 50 / WEEK* Home delivery included For as low as E MERSON - This historic border town needed a new golf course, but at a cost of $ 1.5 million there was no way its 750 residents could afford it. Out went the bugle call for volunteers. Retirees, farmers, custom officers and shift workers - from the likes of Emerson Milling and printer Friesens Corporation - turned up. The Tractor People, JKW Construction and Border Ridge Trucking, as well as local farmers, provided free of charge seven tractors and scrapers, three bulldozers, plus excavators and rock trucks for hauling away mud. In total, 45 volunteers showed up. Many had never driven tractors before but if they had their driver's licence, they could be trained. The work was divvied into five- hour shifts. They worked for two months solid turning a cornfield into the skeleton of a golf course. It has a ways to go yet, but people here hope to open on Canada Day next year. Building the golf course entirely with volunteer labour will cut the cost in half, officials say. " Nobody's getting paid. I'm a local businessman ( owner of the Tractor People in nearby Dominion City). We started seven or eight years ago talking about this," said Bob Felsch, the course designer and project manager. His talks included educating himself on how to build a golf course. He talked with local greenskeepers, landscapers, Southwood Golf Course in St. Norbert, an irrigation specialist, and two golf course architects. " We didn't copy any other course," Felsch said. They needed a water hazard so they excavated 135,000 cubic metres of Red River gumbo. That created a 3.25- acre, 14- feet- deep pond that touches six holes of the nine- hole course. There will be three par 3s, four par 4s, and two par- 5 holes. The eighth hole will be a double dogleg. " It's going to be challenging," vowed Felsch. " This isn't a ' pitch- and- putt' course." It will also be unique. Freight trains will chug slowly along side the new Emerson Golf Course, and should make people look and get lost in their thoughts momentarily, like when trains brush past Shaw Park at Winnipeg Goldeyes games. The trains run along the first railway tracks built in Western Canada, used by the Countess of Dufferin steam locomotive to carry early settlers. The trains will have " a soothing effect" on golfers and help them drain those 30- foot putts and chip- ins from behind the green, said Wayne Arseny, former Emerson mayor and retired customs officer. Arseny, a history buff, also plans to have sign boards at each hole to tell different aspects of local history, from the steamboat traffic that once passed here, to the launch of the North West Mounted Police at Fort Dufferin. The five- person golf course board, which includes Arseny and Felsch, is negotiating with CPR to acquire the railway's former Emerson train station and convert it into their new clubhouse. The group wants CPR to donate it - CPR has so far refused - since the 3,400- square- foot station has sat empty for over two decades, and it will cost enough just to move and restore it. Emerson had a golf course, built in the late 1970s, but it kept flooding every year. The problem wasn't so much spring flooding along the Red, which affects many golf courses in the Red River Valley, but summer flooding caused with every two- inch rainfall. The Red River backs up through Bradley Creek, which put the course under up to five metres of water. That meant loss of business, layoffs, reseeding grasses and diminishing memberships. The new course will be the first inside a ring dike. To buy the farmland, which sells for $ 3,000 an acre here, the town needed a debenture. To pay the debenture, each ratepayer must fork over $ 75 per year over six years to cover the $ 220,000 land purchase. There was opposition. Petitions against the project were started. The kicker was the province's Emergency Measures Organization offered the town a one- time $ 460,000 grant to build a new golf course - and stop paying the town flood- compensation cheques every other year. " We weren't going to let $ 460,000 float back to Winnipeg," said Felsch. Council approved the debenture. The golf course has a quality of life factor that could both attract and keep residents in Emerson, supporters say. " It's absolutely amazing to me this is all being done by volunteers," said Mike Resch, who is also on the fiveperson project board and runs the Emerson Duty Free Shop with his son, Simon. There is still fundraising to do, as much as $ 240,000. About $ 75,000 has been raised toward that so far, including $ 25,000 donations from Emerson Milling, and from Resch's Emerson Duty Free Shop. And Resch doesn't even golf. " Only when I'm at a duty- free convention and it's on the agenda," he said. " But I will be here for the opening round." bill. redekop@ freepress. mb. ca OPEN ROAD BILL REDEKOP Locals chipping in for their community Volunteers making golf course reality JOE BRYKSA / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS Wayne Arseny ( left) and Mike Resch walk past the early beginnings of a man- made water hazard on the future site of a new community- owned golf course being built by volunteers in Emerson. ' It's going to be challenging. This isn't a " pitch- and- putt" course' - course designer and project manager Bob Felsch A_ 13_ Jul- 25- 15_ FP_ 01. indd A13 7/ 24/ 15 8: 51: 31 PM ;