The Refuge Golf Course
Flowood, Miss.
Date played: April 23, 2021
Greens fee: $65 to ride 18
A Golf Solution
to a Hotel Problem
Here’s what you need to understand about central Mississippi’s two major suburban landing areas, Madison County and Rankin County: Madison County probably has Mississippi’s nicest Chick-fil-A restaurant, but Rankin County probably has the busiest.
When white flight hit Mississippi’s capital city, Jackson, in the mid-Twentieth Century, the populations of Hinds County’s previously sleepy, rural neighbors began exploding. In 1950, Rankin County — which lies east of Jackson — accounted for just 14 percent of the tri-county area’s population, and about 37 percent of its population was non-white; now, Rankin County is home to more than 31 percent of the area’s people, and less than a quarter of its residents are people of color. To Jackson’s north, Madison County’s growth has been similar.
Jackson-Area Population (1950)
Today, median per-household income is similar in both places. But when law firms started moving out of Jackson in the 1990s and early 2000s, they moved to Madison County. On the other hand, Rankin County had the area’s first big shopping mall outside the capital city. Make of that what you will.
For all the problems white flight created, Madison County and Rankin County haven’t been able to outrun at least one of Jackson’s shortcomings: the area’s absence of high-quality, public golf. Central Mississippi has plenty of good-to-great golf courses, but nearly all of them are private — a fact that, for many of them, probably says less about whether their business can justify private status and more about the Hinds County residents they’re still trying to run away from.
Jackson-Area Population (2019)
But for years, the Refuge was the exception: a solid, affordable public golf course owned by the City of Flowood in Rankin County. The design was mostly flat, a bit forgettable, and with way too much water in play. But it was affordable (golfers often could play for about $40) and well maintained. And in the Jackson area’s dearth of public golf options, the Refuge filled a crucial role: a reliable, genuinely public option just 15 minutes from downtown Jackson.
Then, in mid-2017, that option disappeared too. The Refuge closed for what the City of Flowood described as “significant upgrades,” with plans to reopen in 2019 alongside a shiny, new hotel and conference center — which the City of Flowood would help subsidize and develop. The golf course’s pro shop would go right off the hotel lobby, and the shop’s door would lead out onto the first tee. Meanwhile, renovations would lengthen the golf course and clear out many of the invasive trees that had shot up over the past 20 years.
But the best laid plans of mice, men, and municipal real estate developers so oft go astray. Although the golf course’s grow-in occurred in the second half of 2018, the Refuge remained closed — while the hotel’s construction dragged along. The City, bound and determined to operate the pro shop out of the hotel, kept the golf course closed for more than two years — until finally, in April 2021, the Refuge reopened.
Even in the light of day, though, the Refuge leaves as many questions unanswered as not.
. . .
Here’s the thing about Flowood: nobody actually lives there. Flowood certainly has caught its fair share of Rankin County’s explosive growth over the past half-century, but more often than not, Flowood’s growth has taken the shape of big-box retail stores rather than communities and neighborhoods. The suburbs flanking Flowood — Rankin County’s Pearl and Brandon to the southeast, and Madison County’s Madison and Ridgeland to the northwest — each have populations of around 25,000 people. Fewer than 10,000 people call Flowood home, though. It has no dedicated high school, and nearly half its housing units aren’t owner-occupied (meaning that rental apartments make up a big portion of Flowood’s homes; in contrast, about 80 percent of Brandon’s residents live in owner-occupied homes).
But Flowood makes an impression: to drive down its main artery, Lakeland Drive, is to be surrounded on all sides by Lowe’s, Hobby Lobby, fast-food spots, and other plastic-adorned big-box stores as far as the eye can see. In November 2020, only seven Mississippi cities generated more sales tax than Flowood, and all but one of them are at least four times Flowood’s size. It’s effectively a company town: generating tons of revenue, but without any clear constituency to serve with those resources.
Turn a small town loose with a lot of public money, and weird things are bound to happen. In 2010, Flowood opened the nation’s only city-owned race track for remote-controlled cars (the track closed in December 2020). And now it’s in the hotel business. But even for a city with a Popeyes, a Raising Cane’s, a Chick-fil-A, a Zaxby’s, and a Chicken Salad Chick all within four miles of one another, hotels are expensive. So when the City decided to help build the new hotel and convention center on Airport Road, it raised half of the project’s $50 million through a bond issue; meanwhile, the project was approved for more than $13 million in sales tax rebates from the state government.
A collection of floating range balls at the back of the Refuge’s “aqua range,” with the adjacent hotel in the background.
And oh yeah, there was also the golf course.
When the Refuge opened in 1998, its length — about 6,600 yards (Bandon Dunes opened a year later at 6,700 yards) — and tight, tree-lined fairways made for a difficult test. As golf equipment evolved over the next few years, the Refuge’s length became less imposing — but as high-handicappers got longer off the tee, the Refuge’s tight corridors became even more a factor than they had been when the Roy Case design opened. Throw in an out-and-back routing that made summertime walks nearly impossible, along with monotonously flat terrain and water hazards in play on no fewer than 10 holes, and it grew into a design that could use some work.
But it certainly didn’t need four years’ worth of work.
To the credit of architect Nathan Crace, who oversaw the renovation at the Refuge (not to mention the Ole Miss Golf Course’s 2008 renovation, a recent bunker renovation at Louisiana’s Tamahka Trails, and another bunker renovation at the Mississippi Gulf Coast’s criminally underrated Oaks Golf Club), he did what he was hired to do: reworking a few holes now brings the routing back to the clubhouse after nine holes; aggressive tree-clearing opened up views across the golf course; and extending the golf course just above 7,000 yards eliminated some of the awkwardness of short par-4s that technology had rendered even shorter than they were in 1998. To Crace’s even further credit, he didn’t take four years to get the course ready for play; the Refuge has been ready to play for at least two years, and the City of Flowood kept it under lock and key while the neighboring hotel was built.
That delay will undoubtedly mystify the Refuge’s long-awaiting visitors: it doesn’t feel like a golf course that underwent a major renovation. Most of the course looks, feels, and plays just like it did four years ago. Trees have been thinned out, and justifiably so; but the fairways remain narrower than necessary, and water hazards are everywhere.
Before its renovation, the Refuge was a tight, tree-lined design heavy on hazards. The renovation’s tree-clearing opened the course up, but water still comes into play frequently.
Again, fairness demands acknowledging that Crace wasn’t hired to fix those problems. Coverage of the renovation’s announcement in 2017 made clear that the project’s goals were threefold: to lengthen the course, to bring the routing back to the clubhouse after nine holes, and to eliminate invasive trees. The renovation accomplished those goals. And yet, in places, the course still feels cramped — trees have been thinned out, but the corridors themselves are not discernibly broader.
In still other places, maintenance botches the architecture’s presentation. For instance, at the short par-4 fourth hole (354 yards from the back tees, 279 yards from the middle tees), the view from tee to green is clear, although impeded by a pot bunker; the tee shot should at least invite the question of whether to try to reach the green. But the fairway is mowed awkwardly to the left, with rough covering nearly the entire line to the green; a bizarre tongue of fairway is cut on that line about 75 yards from the green, but it runs straight into the bunker and is not mowed up to the green. So instead of presenting the challenge that the hole’s design contemplated — play safely to the left, or challenge the righthand bunker for a chance at an eagle — the mowing lines allow only one option, which happens to be the more boring option.
Similarly, at the par-4 14th hole (393 yards from the back tees, 341 yards from the middle tees), a set of uneven hummocks emerges on the right side of the fairway’s landing area, and a tee shot finishing in those hummocks leads to an approach from an awkward stance to a green sitting comfortably on the ground. The situation begs for a running shot, but again, the fairway is not mowed all the way to the green — which eliminates an option that the architect intended to offer.
Somewhere among all the questions surrounding a haphazard setup, two years of closure past the grow-in’s completion, the uncompromising decision to by God stick the pro shop in the new hotel, and design changes that might not have required closing the course at all, there emerges a final question: whether the golf course renovation was really about the golf course at all.
. . .
When the hotel’s owners applied to Mississippi’s state government in 2017 to participate in the sales tax rebate program, the owners touted the project’s potential to lure out-of-state visitors. Its application heavily emphasized the hotel’s adjacent golf course. Even though the hotel’s owners didn’t own the golf course, they explained that they were working hand in glove with the City, and that — as part of the overall construction project — the City would renovate the golf course. The Refuge, the hotel’s owners argued, “would appeal to conferences, corporate meetings and leisure travelers and provide a distinct competitive advantage over direct competitors and other hotels in the area.” The state government bought it, and agreed to provide more than $13 million in sales tax rebates.
Mississippi’s then-Governor, Phil Bryant (second from right), and current Governor Tate Reeves (second from left) at the Flowood hotel’s groundbreaking in 2017. From the beginning, the project billed the golf course and hotel in conjunction with one another. But even after the Refuge’s renovation had been completed, the City of Flowood kept it closed until construction finished on the hotel.
Maybe the hotel would have been approved for those rebates even without a renovation to the golf course. But clearly, neither the hotel owners nor the City was willing to take the chance.
So although the golf course probably was ready to play as early as late 2018, the City saw no need to reopen it — because the renovation was just part of the larger hotel project, and the hotel’s construction still had another 18 months to go. It was never about improving the golf course; it was about improving the attractiveness of the hotel.
Undoubtedly, the Refuge’s renovation accomplishes that. The Refuge is a better golf course today than it was before. It was a better golf course in 2019 too, when the City spent nearly three-quarters of a million dollars to maintain the golf course with no revenue. Then again, a municipality with tons of revenue but no clear constituency will do weird things with public money — including, apparently, letting a newly renovated golf course gather dust while the hotel next door goes up.
Supporting public golf is a perfectly legitimate use of taxpayer money, even when it doesn’t turn a profit: public libraries, public parks, and other public services enjoy taxpayer support without any expectation of profit, because they provide a worthwhile public good and make their communities better places. But any public service receiving public money must, at a bare minimum, actually be available to the public.
The most important part of a publicly accessible golf course, after all, is public access — except when it’s clearly not.
. . .
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