Contentious meeting resutls in pared down golf course clubhouse | Your Observer

Gone is the vision of a two-story Bobby Jones Golf Course clubhouse with wraparound veranda offering a panoramic view of the course and, farther in the distance, the adjacent nature park. Gone is the second-floor restaurant sized to accommodate special and private events with the cart barn below. In addition, gone is $544,211 the city already paid Jon F. Swift Construction to design all that as the blueprints are shelved, perhaps applied to another project for another client in another location. That figure does not include $126,071 added for two on-course bathroom structures and golf cart storage for a total of $670,282.  And also gone, at least for one meeting of the Sarasota City Commission, is the traditionally collegial atmosphere at the dais.  At its Feb. 2 meeting, a divided commission voted 3-2 to scrap plans for a two-story, $11.5 million clubhouse at Bobby Jones and to instruct Swift Construction to embark on designing a one-story design with separate cart barn at a not-to-exceed cost of $7.2 million. The cost to, quite literally, go back to the drawing board — another $514,957. Commissioner Liz Alpert, an attorney who from the beginning has been a proponent of the larger clubhouse design
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