By W. Red Hudson
St. Charles City residents have approved a rezoning request and annexation for the parcel of land that is currently, and has been for decades, the St. Charles Golf Course. Let’s review what we’ve done: we’ve promised ourselves more houses. That’s not what St. Charles needs. It seems the folly here is so deep and so wide that the misdeeds against past, present and future generations in St. Charles City and County are invisible. Indeed, the perpetrators of this community crime are also the victims. And the reasons are multifold – having to do chiefly with poor intergovernmental cooperation and faulty bearing of the public trust. The achievement will be the paving over of nearly every last square foot of open space inside an already wholly developed and mature city.
What’s the half-life of bad propaganda? As is repeatedly advertised, the “highest and best use” (a legal measuring standard) would be housing, not open space. We don’t really need a golf course. Wrong. Of course, the owners of the golf course wish to take as much profit from the fortunate holdings of their progenitors, regardless of the planned cannibalization of the landscape. That would be the “highest and best outcome” for the current titleholders. It is not the highest and best use for the community. Lest we get the two mixed up.
And why? Because a community is not to be a monolithic presentation of houses, tops of houses and houses on top of each other. The premise behind “highest and best use” is planning. The premise behind planning is to shape communities in some sort of functional way. Thus the premise of a community is functionality. Part of function includes amenities. One amenity is a golf course.
Here we are, St. Charles City and County residents, taxpaying for a convention center and hotel. We have amenities in the casino, Main Street, Family Arena, the riverfront, etc. for attracting visitors. Yet the City and County either have allowed or hastened the development of the two public golf courses nearest this grand hotel (St. Andrews, St. Charles). Many visiting business people enjoy golf. Like it or not, they really do. Call it a game for the gentry. Too expensive for some. Too boring for others. Too difficult for most.
The issue is not preserving a game for the ten percent of the population who plays. The land itself is an asset, a public asset to all of us. One party’s land title and profit-taking rights fail to trump the deleterious effect development has on the other spaces across the community. As a golf course, the land would remain open for future use in many potential ways. As a subdivision, foreclosed are the demands of future markets or community needs.
Second, as a part of this discussion, the tenets of the free market remain revered, even though land cannot be a part of the free market. That’s because land is not a commodity, by definition. It cannot be mass-produced. It cannot be reproduced. More is not flowing from the factory doors. Also, land is highly regulated via zoning. A heap of case law, therefore, allows communities to change or not change zoning laws.
Were the golf course owners to take incredible amounts of cash from the sale of their golf course to become a landfill, a rendering plant, or a hazardous materials storage center, citizens would protest. Elected officials would deny zoning. There would be no outcry that “the government” (a.k.a. The People) prevented private landowners from doing what they want with their land. We are nearing the finish line for these types of decisions in St. Charles now. The City is almost completely built out. End-game development has arrived. And it is as noxious to community function as approving a landfill.
St. Charles City or County should both have told St. Charles Golf Course owners, “No. You have created the precedent for your enterprise. If you want to sell it, sell it as a golf course. Do not depend on the actions elected officials to help subsidize your profit taking while it pilfers an asset away from the entire community forever. Zoning request denied.” You could have been brave, County Council members; the Constitution is on your side. You could have stopped this calamity. Instead, City Council members and city residents faced a Hobson’s choice – annexing and zoning it for residential use knowing, if the City did not, the county would. County Council members showed us these colors, their colors, during the St. Andrews Golf Course debacle. This is poor stewardship, poor cooperation, painfully poor leadership. The sum of it has bequeathed to St. Charles City voters an agonizing perpetration upon themselves of another community injustice.
Finally, artist renderings promise this development to look much the same as most. The seemingly drunken fury to gorge as much of St. Charles County land as fast as possible has positioned it as a paradigm of sterile, dysfunctional built environments. The golf course is soon to meet the same doom. It raises an issue: what tourist deplanes an aircraft at Lambert Airport and says, “Let’s head straight to O’Fallon or Florissant or Wentzville or St. Peters or Ellisville, you know, places where we know there’s an Applebee’s. Then we’ll also take in the city’s unique sights.” Few, if any. Just like you’d not get off a plane in Philadelphia to experience the wonder of its suburbs. They’re mostly the same. Mostly nondescript. Every place need not be a tourist destination. They should just be interesting, modestly interesting. The only such attempt in this county is New Town, a planned community-penance after Winghaven’s immense failure.
None of the foregoing contemplates the contradiction entangled with the conservative majority leadership of this County. An excruciatingly burdensome state and federal public subsidy builds the roads and sewers and water lines and electric lines and phone lines and school buildings and police cars and police stations and fire engines and firehouses, and all the collateral salaries into perpetuity. Duplicated and ever-expanding services and infrastructure accompany such unbridled growth. When people can buy houses at 80 cents on the dollar, the prism of reality becomes clearer. The subsidy has fostered four times, 400 percent, more use of Missouri land than 25 years ago with little or no population growth. Funny how we define socialism based upon its intended beneficiary, whether it be for under, middle or over classes. What’s the shelf life of bad legislation?
Two decades of socialized and poor planning notably exposes the fallout. Real community is dying. The percentage of people who can actually walk or take public transportation to a job, a quick shop, a restaurant, a laundry, a park or a public house is so miniscule, that many of them have become tourists in their own county. They drive from their neighborhoods, absent any purposeful destinations by foot, to historic Main Street in order to be able to walk to somewhere – to anywhere – while in a neighborhood. Then they return to their cars to drive back to subdivisions whose only nexus to the outside world is the car. It is this absurdity, growing out of a merciless development foray, which has lead to bizarre perversions such as the current one: turning a golf course into a subdivision.
