community and outside of the of the community very recently there has been a group formed that wants to advocate for the betterment of the facility called friends of bobby jones and we are here today with sean pierson who is the president of the friends of bobby jones and shawn can you just tell me a little bit how the how the organization got started and it started for me at least in two thousand and eleven when the city commission appointed me to represent the interests of bobby jones golf club on the parks recreation and environmental protection advisory board so that pro board has a seat assigned to look after bobby jones golf club and when when i when i got on to the board i started to sort of do my homework do my research and by two thousand and twelve i had spent about three months looking into all of the cities consultancy reports that they had done over the last decade or so and i compiled that into what i called the reports report and at the time i just took all the recommendations that would that have been kind of sitting on the shelf for a while and tried to bring them to life and put them into a coordinated effort the other thing that i saw was that the city had recently or we previously had a bobby jones golf club advisory board and you were a member of that board that at that time the city had this outlived and forum for citizens to talk about the issues of bobby jones th meet every month and there were nine people on that board and that was a decent amount of citizen active activism or citizen input to what happens at bobby jones golf club and a decent amount of time spent talking about those issues and getting those issues broadcast out to the general public on the prep board with only one person representing the interests of bobby jones golf club what we used to have was significant what we have now is just one person reporting to a board and so we might spend fifteen minutes or at most thirty minutes at each meeting talking about bobby jones golf club and that board only meets every other month so it's a really vastly reduced opportunity for the public to have these discussions  let me ask you you're obviously a golfer i would think i am i know you're an architect by training and profession can you tell me more specifically what got you interested in wanting to take on a complex project and it's always difficult there are there are a lot of components to this there's a historical component there's the design there's the there's the management and the functionality the sustainability can you just tell me what specifically interested you well i came here i came into sarasota with this background in architecture and a significant part of my early career was spent in historic preservation and in doing a lot of pro bono community work so our farm would be would be representing communities as development interests came into their communities to have that dialogue so i was used to having this kind of project in front of me if you will or the set of circumstances in front of me but when i did the research into the consultants reports what i saw was that they focused on as you said the operational or the management aspects of the course and they left out some of the things that were important but just not addressed within their subspecialties they left out the historical and cultural aspects and the social aspects and the community wide interest act aspects of bobby jones golf club and they just focused on the nuts and bolts of of day to day operations if you will and the history is is tremendous and fabulous and it better weaves all of the wrangling and circus interests into the early history and development of the town golf in general was a big force  developing not just florida but in developing the city of star so it and that really continues to be so i had years ago been so interested in golf that and in golf design in particular as an architect that i i attended harvard university's graduate school of design they had a design and a golf course design and development institute and attending that and sitting down with some of the best in the design profession the architectural design profession really got me interested in how broad approach you can take when you look at a golf course socially environmentally and so it was really a chance for everything to come together for me and then also i saw that the city needed to have this conversation in a broader context without that bobby jones advisory board and without the amount of time spent i thought there needed to be a bigger conversation and that perhaps a not for profit private institution or the organization could help foster that so that's that's the genesis of starting the the group you have you have spent a enormous amount of time on this project and in front of the commission and was certainly used to seeing your face and hearing an extraordinary extraordinary amount of detail with regard to the  facility and you know long term plans but can you tell me about some of the other folks you've been involved with well it started out with a conversation among just a few people so it was the regular golfers at bobby jones golf club and then it was talking to the women's golf association longstanding history one hundred members or more and then to the men's golf association they've been a tremendous part in the development of the vents of bobby jones golf club going back to the nineteen twenty's and thirty's and so these are people that are there on the golf course day in day out and getting their input and their suggestion box sort of complaints and observations and aspirations  was a big part of getting us started they steered us they steered us pretty well toward the direction of the everyday golfer that plays there in and out bobby jones golf club and to the kinds of observations that those folks make how they compare bobby jones golf with the other local opportunities for socializing and for playing golf and for recreation in general and and to that where they come from their hometowns you know we're we're a city that invites people from all over the country certainly all over the eastern side of the country and from canada and abroad and so we've got a lot of good input from people who have been to some of the best places around the world and can and can interject a little bit of the flavor of this or that place what works for them what works for them here we also started to get a more broad non golfers community input we set up ten so we set up a booth at the farmers market we started doing surveys and listening to what golfers and non golfers had to say about what bobby jones golf club could be should be to them we started talking to the local adjacent  and we learned a lot from them and we started developing maps we started with a google earth image of the entire property it's it's about three hundred forty two acres i noticed walking in the room here that the space occupies up to three hundred forty two people and i noticed that paper on twenty twenty was talking about forty two acres of city property that's involved in their discussion of what we're forty two plus three hundred acres that we're talking about when we talk about bobby jones golf club and that's half of the city's designated parkland so it's a big opportunity to to change not just the sort of day to day thinking about the golf course and the just the organizational thinking about its challenges but the golf course now is really surrounded by a moat with a gate at the bridge and miles of chain link fence and on the other side of those chain link fences are avenues that are conduits in and out of the city that we really can we can open and i guess the best way i could describe it is that instead of having a sort of fenced in which includes fenced out attitude about bobby jones golf club at least how we talk about it in the community that we could have more of a interrelationship way of how we talk about it because when i talk to the community groups the people that live in the neighborhoods surrounding the golf course they have a really different look and feel about that place than i do living county that regularly play the course and to see from their point of view what we can be offering so the the conversation keeps broadening to include experts and to include  more stakeholders if you will and more potential investors in the future of bobby jones golf club they invest now with their time and their enjoyment and their energy and we'd like to see if we can broaden that investment and the benefits to them your organization produced a report that deals with the was a kind of analysis of the syllabi with regards to sustainability and operational aspects of it can you tell us a little more about th well the report you're referring to was actually produced by myself when i was as part of my duties to the prep or so that was authored in two thousand and twelve and it was called r r x it was sort of our ours to redo because it was reassembling all these previous reports in the r x's that it's sort of a a a look at the future a prescription if you will but it just consolidated all of the reports that were done by consultants and put the social and historical context there and today's context there and talked about the tremendous opportunity we have for sports tourism and for making a real environmental  positive environmental and social impact at bobby jones golf club and the prep ward in turn accepted that report they voted unanimously to send the report to the city commission and and as as a way of representing what what they wanted to say to the city commission about bobby jones golf club and we have since taken that report and expanded upon it through what we've learned i've been visiting with the golf professionals from maine to  from miami to boston and probably fifty different clubs and learning as much as we possibly can and getting great support from the golf community about what's happening here and in sarasota people all around the  country are starting to learn about what's happening in sarasota can you tell me there are four specific initiatives that the friends of bobby jones have outlined can you tell me a little bit about them specifically and perhaps what the community benefit sure those components are well the the initiatives were were simply a way to take this really complex set of issues and put them into four interrelated and more user friendly of that and digestible baskets the the bobby jones initiative just says you know what we need to we need to start talking about this place in terms of a vision of what we want to be as a community what do we want to be in ten twenty thirty years so when we establish that vision with the community stakeholders then we can create a master plan for it similar to the conversations with bayfront twenty twenty very similar process actually and similar sets of of principles that we want to unearth stuff from the community and then once we have that we we put that with a marketing master plan and with performance metrics the kinds of things that we draw from the national golf foundation reports from the u s g s reports that we've done from the architect's reports but it's a way to organize that  donald ross initiative says the most valuable asset we've got on that piece of property is the historic one thousand twenty five ross course so let's respect that let's restore it let's preserve it it's a historic preservation project and the goal s b initiative recognizes that john hamilton going to be our first elected mayor of brought to sarasota and to florida the first golf course and it's a tie to our history from gillespie to the wranglings to today and  it's about growing the game and making this a community based and a community wide resource and then the azinger initiative says we've got these two courses that were built in one thousand fifty two and in one thousand to nine all courses that were built in one hundred fifty two and  eighty seven and they were never really meant to work well together and they don't so it's a it's a reinvestment in those courses to to sort of make those a comprehensive and and modern offering for a for golfers concern for the this asset that this city enjoying enjoys and hopefully we can work together to provide for greater sustainability and greater experience for all the citizens and all the users of the facility