Always interested in the quick charges of boondoggle....
As to funding, it says "The $24.5 price tag will be funded by three sources. About $9.5 million will come from the state's capital outlay budget, $6 million from FEMA and $8.9 from the Bayou District Foundation." It also mentions some private funds coming in, probably to fund the Bayou District portion. So, of that 24.5M, some doesn't need to be paid back (I think( as it was recovery funds from FEMA and the state. I believe a resort course in New Orleans could fund the public portion of $8.9M. I could be wrong, but it sounds reasonable enough.
As to construction cost, we don't know the specs. We do know sand capping which has to be a few million. We know it is at sea level, meaning they probably had to grade a lot to control water flow. We can assume there are some strict tree preservation regulations and maybe other neighborhood mitigation. A typical problem on urban courses is routing those trucks for sand hauling. Limited routes and hours in the city may raise the cost/time of hauling that sand in.
We don't know what the time limits, damages for delay, etc., are. but in city contracts, they can be severe. Add in a rainy climate and low lying ground, and the contractors may have bid a few million dollars just for risk in the bid.
Lastly, with the PGA Tour involved, they do set a high standard for every phase of the project. I know Colbert Hills was going to be a PGA Tour course, until their minimum standards raised the cost from everything from clubhouse, to maintenance building, to grass selection (for playability, even though it was a hard choice to maintain in KS). Their standard maintenance building plan was going to cost about $2M, and we ended up building a pretty nice one for half a million or so, for example.
I know of a few municipal remodels getting to cost over $10-15M. funny, but even as the economy has suffered, the cost of construction still rises, usually blamed (until recently) on oil prices affecting plastics manufacturing, trucking mileage charges, etc. It does seem to make the economics of golf even tougher.