Golf cart war over; gas beats electric 5-2

On a split decision, the Wichita City Council picked gas over electric in buying 240 new carts for the city’s golf courses.

After months of debate and study, the council chose gas-powered Yamaha “Quietech EFI” carts as the workhorses of the city’s cart fleet.

With a trade-in of 204 older electric carts, the cost for new carts will be $950,000.

Approval followed a recommendation from the Park and Recreation Department, which said gas-powered carts will be cheaper in the long run and help alleviate cart shortages at peak hours, because they don’t need to be recharged between rounds.

The vote was 5-2, with council members Bryan Frye and Janet Miller dissenting.

They expressed concern that money for the purchase will come from other city park and forestry programs outside the Golf Department enterprise fund.

Greg Ferris, a former City Council member who serves on the Golf Advisory Committee, urged the council to act quickly and buy new carts because the old ones are worn out and run out of power on the course.

He said the last time he played, he watched a course employee have to push a battery-depleted cart across three fairways to get it back to the charging barn.

“This is not an uncommon sight, unfortunately,” Ferris said. “It’s something you see often, dead carts around the golf course.”

He also said the courses lose about 400 to 600 rounds of revenue a year because they don’t have enough carts to meet the demand at peak times.

“They (golfers) would just leave,” he said. “They don’t want to wait a half hour or 45 minutes” for a cart.

J.C. Moore, a retired professor of physical chemistry who taught at Friends, Newman and Wichita State universities, urged the council to go with electric carts for environmental reasons.

While the new fuel-injected carts are cleaner than the older models that used carburetors, they’re not zero-emissions like electric carts and they will add to the city’s ongoing smog problem, he said.

He noted Wichita is close to falling out of compliance with federal air-pollution limits. And that could trigger mandatory smog reduction programs costing residents and businesses an estimated $10 million a year.

Buying gas carts “sends the wrong message” at a time when the city is asking residents to cut back on smog-producing activities, including use of small gas engines, Moore said.

“The carts themselves will not put us over that (federal pollution threshold), but they certainly contribute to it,” he said.

This story was originally published March 7, 2017 at 5:01 PM with the headline "Golf cart war over; gas beats electric 5-2."