Tonawanda, N.Y. (WBEN) - Nearly two months after the Paddock Chevrolet Golf Dome in Tonawanda was taken out of commission during the Christmas Weekend blizzard in Western New York, business is ready to get back up and running on Saturday.
"It took a lot of hard work and effort by a lot of people to get us to this point. We're thrilled to be able to get it open before the snow leaves us," said Town of Tonawanda Supervisor Joe Emminger. "This is our busy season, as you can imagine, and the fact that it went down on Christmas Eve did impact the town financially. But we're all excited."
The Paddock Golf Dome will re-open to the public as of 8 a.m. EST on Saturday, with both the upper and lower-level tees opening for golfers, as well as the miniature golf course.
Emminger hopes local golfers were patient as the town worked to get the facility back up and running after the blizzard.
When speaking shortly after the storm with WBEN, Emminger said it was a malfunction in one of the blowers that saw the golf dome deflate. Other than that, Emminger says the golf dome escaped the storm with just some rips in the skin.
"We were able to do all the repairs on site, our contractor was able to do them on site, and the blowers have been repaired," he said. "We're looking forward to the next few months of being pretty busy in there."
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Emminger has been asked a number of times over the last month-and-a-half about the status of the golf dome for Western New Yorkers who may look to the facility to get out and be active when they don't do other winter-related activities. He's thankful to say that things could have been much worse than it ended up being for the dome itself.
"We originally thought that we weren't going to be able to get it up until probably September, October, which would have really not been good for anybody. But our team and our department head, they worked through things, they came up with a way and met with a lot of different people, and were able to figure out a way to get it done much sooner. Much, much sooner than we had anticipated," Emminger said. "The cost to get it done was roughly about $235,000-$240,000. We have insurance that's going to cover everything except $100,000. ... We're just happy we were able to get it up in a month-and-a-half, as opposed to 10 months."
In the time away from business, Emminger had received a number of calls from the public looking for ways to assist in getting operations back up and running. It was actually one caller who chimed in with a way to solve the issue at hand, helping accelerate the re-opening process.
"It wasn't a town employee or anything like that. He knew somebody who knew somebody, small community and ended up being the trick, so to speak, to getting the thing up quicker," Emminger said. "We're very happy that our residents do take pride, do take an interest in our Paddock Chevrolet Golf Dome, and it was because of that interest that really spearheaded us getting it up sooner.
Emminger adds he expects a pretty packed house for the first weekend back in business for the golf dome.
"I'm going to try and get over there tomorrow," he said with a laugh. "I don't know if I'm going to be able to get over there right at 8 o'clock, but I'm going to try and get over there early to hit a bucket of balls myself."