PELL JUNCTION, Mo. — A Pell Junction resident who has spent 17 years opposing what he calls “every wasted dollar” in the village budget, and whose public comments led the library board to cancel its $212 annual newspaper subscription in March, told the village board Tuesday that the estimated taxpayer cost of the President’s golf trips is “different, because it’s golf,” and proposed converting the library into a driving range “so we can be part of it.”
Ed Pasko, 68, a retired insurance adjuster, has attended 211 consecutive meetings of the Pell Junction Board of Trustees and spoken during public comment at 209 of them, according to village minutes. In that time he has successfully opposed a $38 replacement flag for the post office, a $64 holiday wreath, and a $9 bag of rock salt that he argued “the sidewalk didn’t ask for.”
“Every dollar this village spends, I want to see the receipt,” Pasko said during Tuesday’s meeting, which was called to order at 7:01 p.m. with all five trustees present. “With the golf, I trust the man.”
Independent trackers count roughly 140 days on which the President has played golf since returning to office in January 2025, about 22 percent of his days in office, most of them at clubs he owns. A 2019 Government Accountability Office report estimated that each presidential trip to Mar-a-Lago in 2017 cost the government about $3.4 million, chiefly for travel and security. One independent tracker estimates the total taxpayer cost of the President’s second-term golf travel at about $124.7 million. The White House has not confirmed that figure.
Pasko said he had reviewed the figures and found them “lean.” Asked how a single $3.4 million golf trip compared to the library’s $212 newspaper subscription, Pasko said the newspaper had been “a luxury,” because “people can read the news at home,” and that the golf was “essential,” because “he can’t golf at home.” The Reporter’s data desk calculated that the cost of one presidential golf trip would fund the library’s newspaper subscription for about 16,000 years, a period Pasko said would be “wasteful.”
Pasko’s proposal, submitted in writing on the back of a printout of the 2026 village budget, calls for the library’s reading room to be cleared and replaced with four hitting bays, a putting green in the children’s section, and a ball-return chute through the book drop. The proposal estimates the cost of the conversion at $1.2 million, which Pasko said would be “an investment,” and which is about 5,660 times the newspaper subscription he opposed as “an expense.” He said the driving range would be open to the public on weekdays and reserved on weekends “in case someone important comes through.”
Trustee Bernard Kinsella asked whether Pasko would apply the same scrutiny to the driving range that he had applied to the rock salt. Pasko said he would, and that he had already identified a savings: the range would not need a newspaper.
Dr. Chad Brickhouse, a senior fellow at the Institute for Common Sense, said Pasko’s position was consistent. “Waste is when money goes somewhere you don’t like,” Brickhouse said by phone from what he described as the 14th hole. “If you like where it went, that’s spending. It’s just common sense.” Brickhouse then asked the reporter to hold, and was heard, faintly, to say “fore.”
The board tabled Pasko’s proposal by a vote of 4-1 after 41 minutes of discussion. The dissenting vote was cast by Trustee Ruth Abernathy, who said she wanted to table it permanently. The library has since received an anonymous donation of $212, with a note reading “for the paper,” which Pasko has formally objected to as “unbudgeted.”