Ryan,
I read the article and didn’t see the 5 to 7 million $ figure for the golf course, but regardless renovating Normandie will take a lot of money. Ideally you could just go in a do some agronomic improvements and jumpstart the place, but that’s not the situation there. To address all the needed updates at Normandie, which as you likely know, has not had any real capital improvements in decades, you get a fairly big number. When you add up the items they need to to address: irrigation system, irrigation lake - for a water supply that isn’t expensive city water, drainage, refurbished greens, new tees, updated fairway and rough grass, dead tree removal, strategic and agronomic tree removal, old deteriorated cart path removal, new cart paths where needed, some bridges, a maintenance facility, maintenace equipment, course grow in, some type of clubhouse update, parking, etc etc. it can, unfortunately, get more expensive than you would imagine pretty quickly. If only north St. Louis was a sandbelt...