Given the few comments, I almost hate to admit my involvement there. It appears the routing is unchanged, save for reversing 10 and 18 (going left side, might be renumbered now) to hook OB. Those two sliced OB but we did get complaints from homeowners. We didn't change the routing either, as it was just so tight and so tightly configured to the housing.
It was my last project for Ken Killian before leaving on my own. I actually had announced my intention to form my own company, but agreed to stay on because he had already committed to Jim Colbert to put me out there as a full time field guy, so I stayed, and it eventually led to me designing many better courses.
I lived in the Sands hotel for six weeks during green building, often drawing the green detail the night before staking it out. In a way, it was sort of a free shot at trying some of my ideas and letting them fail under the Killian banner, if that is what was going to happen. Not that I wasn't going on my own eventually anyway, but a few simple things accelerated that - them not allowing me to use chocolate drop mounds or grass bunkers for one thing.
A few things that are interesting.....the water table there is about 2 feet below the surface. I have photos of union dozer guys stuck in the mud several times over, to my chagrin.
While most were sort of standard Killian muni greens, I did experiment. The old 12th, a par 3 was sort of bland, but I got on the dozer guy for building shallow bunkers because he thought that is what a muni needed. I told him to dig the front right grass bunker deeper. I went somewhere else, and looked over, and thought he had left the job, as I saw no dozer. As I headed that way, I barely saw the top of a dozer coming out of the hole and he said he was going to show me what a deep bunker was. Colbert was scheduled to visit that day, and I was a bit worried about the guy overdoing it, but Jim loved it and it stayed.
The other par 3 on that nine was similar. Ken always (and I mean always) put two or three mounds behind a green. I had the "revolutionary" idea to put a swale behind the green, sort of the dreaded grass bunkers, because Colbert said it would get tiring to always be chipping down hill. After the swale, I swept back up into the backing mounds. Putting it further behind the green really added depth the scene, and when Ken and Jim reviewed the prelim shaping on the tee, they both loved the look. But, when we got to the green Jim really loved the grass swale, but Ken kept insisting "we don't do things like that" even though he had liked it on the tee, and the client liked it. (That argument is one of the things that convinced Jim to continue with me, although there were other factors)
Lastly, I had contoured the 17th green draining right on the front, and left on the back half. It had a great rolling look, but Colbert hated that and thought there should be no reverse slope putts on a muni. I recall the phrase, "Well, Brauer, you must be the best damn putter in the whole wide world if you think this is a good idea!" But, due to time constraints, it stayed.
Later on, BTW, Jim used that phrase on John Colligan, my field guy for Links of Sierra Blanca. John had put a mound in the middle of a par 5 green, where Jim felt should always be a safe, receptive target (with tough pins being reserved for green edges). I let it stay before Jim's next site visit, knowing full well what the reaction would be, but thought it would be a good part of John's education to hear it direct from Jim.......ah the good old days!
Glad to see it being refurbished. It has laid fallow for a few years when we got there in 1984, and ours was a low budget project. We even kept most of the old irrigation, and there was several types of pipe and different manufacturers sprinklers heads, as if Clark County used whatever was cheapest at any given time.
I had heard of Dick Wilson, and played La Costa by that time, but never felt he was out there to see that course under construction because it was clearly less well shaped and built than LC.