Not many publicly owned golf courses start out quite so good as Aldeen Golf Club, a 1991 Dick Nugent design that routinely draws daily-fee players from Chicagoland north to Madison and Milwaukee.
Even fewer municipal tracks are handed $2 million to renovate the bunkers, and no one appreciates that fact more than superintendent Charlie Mongan.
Three years ago, a local foundation and two very generous Aldeen regulars donated money earmarked specifically for bunker refurbishment. Late in November 2025, Mongan, architect Mike Benkusky and contractor Golf Creations raced the elements to finish the three-month project. They reshaped all 77 bunkers, equipping each one with a Better Billy Bunker liner and Pro/Angle sand. To the delight of Mongan’s maintenance crew, they also reduced Aldeen’s total square bunker footage by a third.
“We’ve worked with municipal clients all over the Midwest for 25 years, but this funding mechanism was definitely a new one on our firm,” Golf Creations president Jim Lohmann says. “When we handle projects for various taxing bodies, things can get plenty creative. But it’s more often that a park district will have a certain, limited amount of dollars and we have to rebuild this green, right now, or that money goes somewhere else.
“The Aldeen project was very different in scope and specificity. But it’s funny: Not so much for us. Because it was a fall renovation, we went with our mini-excavators and skid loaders that have tracks on them, or turf tires. At that time of year, the bigger machines will really tear a place up. So, we game-planned the job down to every last detail and watched every penny. Because that’s what we always do — especially here in Illinois.”
Illinois is a prevailing wage state where, by law, a minimum hourly rate for laborers on government-funded construction projects is paid to ensure fair wages based on location and work type. As a result, it’s notoriously expensive to bid and bring course projects to on-budget conclusions.
In July 2025, the Illinois legislature passed a prevailing wage hike, a month before the Aldeen project broke ground.
“That wasn’t planned on,” Mongan says, “but it’s something we just had to deal with. To be honest, it was one thing among dozens that Jim, Mike and I dealt with together. The discussion, the ebb and flow between the three of us has been really good. Mike is very open with maintenance matters and Jim was great about anything I saw that didn’t turn out the way I’d planned. For example, getting the angles right on the flash up. They weren’t steep enough at first and Golf Creations did a great job adjusting those to our liking — and avoiding major change orders.
“I realize this project was different from a funding standpoint, but we’re still a municipality. We could rely on Golf Creations to track day-in, day-out costs and working things out with Mike in the field, to avoid bringing the political red tape into it. They made sure we were all happy and everyone made the wages they need.”
Aldeen, a facility operated by the Rockford Park District, is one of four city-owned golf courses. But all four tracks were not created equal. Even prior to the 2025 bunker renovation, Aldeen was unquestionably the best of the bunch — a relatively modern, well-designed track that routinely hosted U.S. Open Qualifying events and attracted visiting golfers within a 100-mile radius.
“It’s also very well maintained, on account of the super job Charlie does,” Benkusky said. “At $74 for a round of golf, you can see why folks travel from all over. It’s a real bargain for a very good golf course.”
Benkusky was hired three years ago to develop a master plan for Aldeen, but these very large, very public gifts to the course — and the donors’ very specific renovation goals — limited the scope of that master plan. “This’ll probably be it for now. There are no plans to touch the greens, for example,” Benkusky says. “What they may need next is a new irrigation system, which is 30-plus years old.”
The aged irrigation system at Aldeen nevertheless received plenty of attention this past fall. “We’ve all been trying to work around the irrigation on this project,” Lohmann says. “The as-builts were not very helpful, as in, ‘Uh, there isn’t supposed to be irrigation here.’ So, we have to move it or make an adjustment on the fly. It’s been very helpful having Benkusky on this job because he’s local and onsite weekly to make those decisions.
“Our job as contractor and project manager is to get ahead of that — and we’ve been able to develop a system, all three of us, that keeps things moving. Charlie’s been great with taking the initiative: He’ll often take pictures and talk to Mike on the phone, then relay the decision to us. Otherwise, we move to the next one and go back to it.”
According to Benkusky, that sort of productive give-and-take is typical of this course builder: “Golf Creations is always great to work with. They listen. Then we work something out. Renovation is harder than original design because you don’t know what you’re getting into. Like when you open up a wall in your house. What are you gonna find? Just today, we found an irrigation line extending three feet into a bunker. So, Jim says, ‘Well, you know what? We gotta move the line.’ Golf Creations does it the right way, or makes it right. No one wants to come back later and do it.”
Replacing what Benkusky called “oversized, cape-and-bay-type bunkers from the early ’90s” with more up-to-date models was the fun part. The lion’s share of the planning, however, required designing for the long term — then working closely with the superintendent and contractor in the field.
With a firm eye on what can and should be achieved over the long term.
“What does that mean? Well, we took 100,000 square feet of bunkers down to 70,000. That’s not nothing,” Benkusky says. “It’s gonna save Charlie and his maintenance team a lot of man hours going forward.”
So will the installation of 77 individual Better Billy Bunkers liners. This is undoubtedly a big-ticket item in terms of upfront cost, but it comes with comparable future savings in terms of labor hours.
“We tell clients that, depending how much reshaping is required and the specific liner product — and there are lots of liner products out there — installation can be anywhere from $9 to $10 per square foot, up to $17 per square foot,” Lohmann says. “That’s a lot of money for a public or municipal facility, obviously. And again, here in Illinois, the prevailing wage issue makes a big difference.
“But it’s becoming more common because these courses and savvy superintendents like Charlie realize the time and money they’re saving by not dealing with bunkers every day after a big rain. There is so much maintenance savings to be realized by eliminating or limiting that. It’s expensive up front, but after two to three years a course makes it back.”
Lohmann added that, with the understanding that liners and proper face angles are going to keep sand in place, contractors and architects can better address strategy and aesthetics — within the framework of budget constraints.
“Mike, Charlie and I agreed that some of the mounding at Aldeen was a bit out of control. In some spots it encroached on fairways and ultimately made the landing areas smaller. We wanted to expand those, to get the fairway lined up to the new bunkers — to give them more impact, to create more ways to approach the golf hole. It’s one reason these new bunkers have such a strong visual impact on the play corridors and green complexes.
“It was more of a strategic thing than an aesthetic thing, and anywhere else we’d have seeded a lot of that work, maybe half sod and half seed. At Aldeen, we sodded 275,000 square feet of bluegrass and 80,000 square feet of bent, which is $1.50 per square foot these days. From job to job, decisions like that all depend on the budget.”
The two donors behind the bunker project — a married couple, Rick and Lana Engen; along with the Aldeen Golf Foundation, started by course namesakes Norris and Margaret Aldeen — were conscientious, civic-minded people. They were wealthy and chose to donate money to a municipal golf course. One might assume they had something of a bunker fetish. Such was the targeted nature of their largesse. But that’s not true.
“The bunkers were more my idea,” Mongan says, “and some of that urgency came from a USGA course report that indicated we had too many contaminated bunkers that didn’t drain well — which certainly explained the massive washouts we’ve been getting after 8 to 9 inches of rain all at once. They cost us so many man hours. Most of the [problem] bunkers had one single piece of drainage tile.”
But the Engens and Aldeens did have one bunker-related request that had nothing to do with the superintendent’s lived experience. And it didn’t exactly fit with the practical, cost-conscious ethos that guided this project.
That outlier would be the blindingly white Pro/Angle sand that Golf Creations loaded into the newly reshaped, newly lined bunkers.
“It’s one of the premier sands,” Benkusky says. “If you have the budget, it firms up very well and drains fantastic. That, combined with the Better Billy Bunkers, really allows for more consistent play. It’s better at packing on the higher flashed faces. You just don’t worry about that sand moving much.And yeah: It’s very white — visually stunning against the green backdrop. They’ve been having golfers out to Aldeen for test tours.
“The good news is they absolutely love the new bunker style and the white sand. They say things like, ‘This looks like a TPC-style golf course!’ The bad news is, even more people will want to play the golf course.”
Benkusky isn’t being coy. Reports like this one often talk about how well regarded the golf course is, and sometimes the reporter is just being politic. But Aldeen is genuinely popular — to the point of bumping up against unwise wear and tear.
Late in August 2025, when Mongan shut down the first nine holes for renovation, the facility was already 12 percent ahead of 2024 in terms of rounds played — after opening late, on May 1, due to torrential April rains. Aldeen enjoyed the same play increase in 2024, compared with 2023.
“It’s almost like, How much can we charge to get fewer players?” Lohmann asks rhetorically. “Because all that play is beating the hell out of the course.” The superintendent admits that the Rockford Park District golf team is already talking about how much play will increase and what price adjustments might be needed due to the bunker improvements. “I’m already worried about how I’m gonna take care of this golf course. Between the sand and bunkers, folks are sort of awestruck by how beautiful it is. … And we’re not even open yet.”
Mongan explains that part of this phenomenon is much broader than Aldeen’s reputation as an upscale public golf venue. He and his staff have seen sizeable increases in rounds played every year since COVID-19, when new golfers — especially golf-novice millennials — started showing up.
“We’re trying to educate them — mainly through GPS systems, in the carts — about the importance of raking bunkers and fixing pitch marks.”
Only $1.8 million of the donated $2 million will be spent on the project. The bunkers-only specificity of the donation leaves a couple hundred grand still to be spent exclusively on bunker-related matters “That’s a lot of bunker rakes,” Benkusky quips.
It remains to be seen how many young golfers will use them.
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