Bunker Maintenance Cost

After looking over the course survey's this year, it seems that bunkers and native areas received the most negative responses.  We continue to find ways to improve in these areas but we also have to keep in mind that both of these items are considered hazards.  I know they play a very important role in Sagamore's golf course design and we do have to find ways to keep them in the best possible conditions.  Today I want to concentrate on just the bunkers issues.  I will write another blog post which will focus on the native areas.  Last year I set out to document all maintenance that went into our bunkers.  This consisted of daily maintenance, renovations, along with time to place bunkers back after a heavy rainfall.  Each day I wrote down the man hours spent in bunkers and then multiplied that by the average wage of our employees.  This would at least give me a rough estimate of how much was spent each month on bunker maintenance.  I also tracked daily rainfall to see how weather effects the overall cost of maintenance.  As you can see the total yearly cost was $42,025 to maintain our bunkers at Sagamore.  August and September were our wettest months and these were the months with the highest totals of bunkers maintenance cost.  Again we will be looking at more efficient ways to maintain our bunkers but as you can see bunkers are expensive and it is very difficult to have all of them consistent on a daily basis.  I will be tracking labor cost again this year to see how it compares.

Month	Temp Average	Total Rain(in)	Total Labor Hours	Total Cost
March	69.09	1.95	494	$           4,446.00
April	64.13	1.69	575	$           5,175.00
May	80.45	1.75	621	$           5,589.00
June	85.9	1.05	409.5	$           3,685.50
July	93.10	2.36	567	$           5,103.00
August	84.4	5.27	720	$           6,480.00
September	74.73	6.94	735	$           6,615.00
October	61.67	4.28	548	$           4,932.00
Year Total		25.29	4669.5	$         42,025.50