BATON ROUGE -- The Legislature is poised to sign off on a $9.2 million bailout of the financially struggling Tournament Players Club Louisiana golf course near Avondale on top of the $18.4 million the state has poured into the private project in the past decade.

Among the factors driving the deal is a clause in an old contract that could allow the 250-acre site to revert to the private donors of the land unless the course is maintained by professional golf tournament operators.

Proponents of the deal have pitched it as a money-saver for the state, a conclusion they reached by assuming that the current state subsidy would expand over a seven-year period at a cost of $14.6 million. But the current subsidy, which has been widely criticized, is expiring this year and no such obligation exists for that cost-saving comparison.

Congratulations to Friends of New Orleans City Park for winning the $50,000 Greater Outdoors Project grant from Redwood Creek wines and Planet Green! Go to www.blazethetrail.com/greatoutdoors/ for more information on the organization’s Couturie Forest restoration project. Also, look for Friends of New Orleans City Park to be featured in a Redwood Creek advertising campaign later this year. We’ll track progress of the project on BlazeTheTrail.com, so be sure to check there from time to time for updates!

To me, it was a case of good news followed by bad news, not that the bad news wasn't anticipated.

One moment our sporting public is cheering a vote by NFL owners to send a 10th Super Bowl to our town.

A few days later, we learned, by a vote of 36-0, City Park's Board of Commissioners OK'd the building of a "championship" golf course on real estate that long has served as home for the public golfer.

If you happened to live here, it was easy to cheer the first vote.

But the second vote?

I'll put it this way: Assuming you had "affordable" greens fees in mind for the public golfers of this area, not fees in the neighborhood of $75 to play 18 holes, building a "championship" golf course in City Park makes no sense.

Because it makes sense only if you want to turn City Park into a version of City Park Country Club.