It is certainly not another project like The Rawls Course, although it has been undertaken for a similar noble cause.
The Colorado Golf Association's goal is to spend the $4 million they have raised over the past 15 years, to improve the course while keeping it a $40 facility that's open to everyone. They aren't going to raise the maintenance budget at all so we can't do anything outlandish that would be expensive to maintain.
We have redone the routing completely because the Mira Vista routing was really dysfunctional, with some long green-to-tee walks for no apparent reason and the holes spaced out oddly across the property. Other than that, we've concentrated on building a good set of greens and a handful of interesting, low-maintenance bunkers which are small and grass-faced ... we hope to have no more than 40 or 50 on the finished course.
We have chosen to spend the bulk of the money on infrastructure rather than on aesthetics ... the irrigation system is nearly half the budget and the greens are much of the rest. We are moving some earth to the edges of the property to block road views and noise, but that is entirely a function of needing to increase the volume of the flood control basin which includes about 3/4 of the golf course property ... which is being paid for separately by the neighboring development.
The styling of the greens and bunkers is loosely based on Chicago Golf Club, however the associates were expressly forbidden from building any template holes from the Macdonald palette. (I did have to remind one of them that the Eden hole had been appropriated by Macdonald, so we would not mimic it here.)
I will actually be out there next Monday to see how things are going -- I haven't been back since it started snowing, but in the freeze/thaw climate of Denver they have done a lot of work over the past 3 months.