Golf and Gardens?

More like golf and jungle.

The growing season is here, and with the city no longer expending resources on maintaining state-owned property, the Georgia Golf Hall of Fame Botanical Gardens looks like a scene from the History Channel's Life After People , the documentary showing what might happen if humans disappeared.

The once-lush grounds have become a landscape of brown and dull green. Ivy is overtaking arbors and pergolas. Vine canopies are lumpy and lopsided, like heads in need of haircuts. Sapling- and shrub-sized weeds have popped up across the mini course and around benches and the sculpted birds beside the pond.

The spot where the bronze Jack Nicklaus statue stood is covered by knee-high grass, unrecognizable as a golf green save what's left of the sand traps. Weeds have sprouted in cracks in the brick surface between the two clock towers, and the towers are accumulating black grit.

In the midst of it all are intermittent red flowers and white magnolia blossoms, reminders of what once was.

Mayor Deke Copenhaver said the state of the golf gardens doesn't surprise him.

"This was always my concern of what would happen," he said, "that we would have a vacant, 17-acre, weed-infested piece of property producing no tax revenue."

Last month, he took a barrage of criticism after announcing with Augusta GreenJackets owner Cal Ripken Jr. that ground could be broken this fall on a new $38.7 million baseball stadium, which would incorporate the gardens in a public-private, multiuse development. The two had been encouraged by a conference call with Gov. Sonny Perdue, but their plan stalled when they learned transferring the land from the state to the city would take an act of the legislature, which doesn't meet again until 2010.

With Augusta commissioners now at odds over the funding of the downtown trade, exhibit and event center on a site a few blocks away -- a controversy threatening to sink the $184.7 million special-purpose sales tax package before voters -- Mr. Copenhaver said he won't be bringing his stadium proposal back up anytime soon.

Meanwhile, vines spread. Grass grows. Weeds proliferate.

Once envisioned to become one of the city's finest and most popular attractions, the golf gardens opened in 2001 and ate up $13 million in public funds -- $6 million of it sales tax money -- plus millions more in private donations, including $1 million from the Augusta National Golf Course. A 55,000-square-foot building to house the hall of fame never materialized, hurting visitor numbers and revenues. A crippling blow came two years ago this month when the governor vetoed a $633,685 appropriation, calling it unreasonable.

In June 2007, the golf hall closed the site, and the plants soon withered in the midst of a drought. Later that year, the board approved an agreement for the city to take over maintenance, and the property was kept in sufficient shape to hold the 2008 Mayor's Masters Reception there.

The city spent $112,170 on upkeep before giving it up in December, one of several cost-cutting measures that helped balance the 2009 budget to avoid a tax rate increase.

The property remains the responsibility of the Hall of Fame, because two bills that would have undone that failed in the General Assembly this year. One, drafted by Sen. Ed Tarver, would have dissolved the board and transferred the land and the six bronze golfer statues to the city. The other would have privatized the golf hall, taking the property out of its purview but keeping it state-owned.

Marketing Director Robyn Jarrett said the golf hall doesn't have funds to maintain the grounds. Realizing this, the First Saturday Crew, volunteers who spend weekends cleaning up the Augusta Canal, offered to take over a few months ago.

Organizer and radio station WGAC-FM (93.1) reporter Scott Hudson said he talked to the mayor, then Ms. Jarrett, about getting access to the property, but gave up because he felt he was being made to jump through hoops.

"We just finally said at that point, we're not going through this mess, not to cut grass," Mr. Hudson said.

Ms. Jarrett said she only asked Mr. Hudson to submit a request in writing so she could take it to the board, but he never did.

First Saturday volunteer and former Augusta commissioner Andy Cheek said at one point the group considered breaking a lock and doing the work anyway, just to make a statement. They decided against it, seeing as how two of the volunteers are sitting commissioners Joe Bowles and Joe Jackson.

Mr. Cheek said the Hall of Fame board has "demonstrated selfishness to a whole new level."

"Every member of that board, to me, ought to be criminally prosecuted for violation of the public trust," he said.

Mr. Copenhaver maintains that the baseball stadium is still the best hope for reviving the property. Last year, the state put out a request for proposals for other uses for it, and other than the stadium idea submitted by the city, Ripken Baseball and developer Jacoby Group, the only others were for a job training center by Goodwill Industries and an assisted-living complex.

Now, Mr. Perdue is "very enthusiastic" about the plan, the mayor says, and willing to shepherd the land transfer through the state bureaucracy so long as it's for building a stadium.

"There is no alternative," Mr. Copenhaver said. "I've said for the past three years that if anyone has any better ideas, I'm willing to listen. But nobody's come to me with a better proposal."

Reach Johnny Edwards at (706) 823-3225 or johnny.edwards@augustachronicle.com.