Sonoma County golf courses using recycled water to stay green

The reservoirs are dwindling, the aquifers are drying up and the fingers are starting to point. A lush lawn can be a source of suspicion during this seemingly endless drought, a hand-washed car the subject of arched eyebrows. And if we’re looking for targets, what could serve better than acre after acre of vivid green turf, sitting right across the road from parched brown fields?

In the eyes of some, golf courses, those symbols of prosperous leisure, have begun to stand for something else entirely: water waste in a land of shortage.

“There is a big perception out there, particularly with the non-golfer,” said Bob Harchut, general manager of The Links at Bodega Harbour. “They see the golf course being watered, and they think we’re wasting money. It’s like, these damn golf courses, they’re using water that could be used for houses and gardens.”

Harchut is not mistaken. There is growing sentiment that golf courses are bad guys in this Western water war.

Last summer, for example, the pop-culture site VICE.com ran an essay under the headline, “Instead of Killing Lawns, We Should Be Banning Golf.” The author, Charles Davis, wrote, “When more than half the state is categorized as suffering the most severe form of drought, … old rich white men should not be driving little carts around on beautifully manicured green lawns in the middle of a (bleeping) desert.”

Certainly, there are golf courses in Palm Springs and other arid areas of Southern California and the Central Valley that rely on massive amounts of municipal water to survive. Those courses are experiencing some trauma in the wake of mandatory, statewide water restrictions announced by Gov. Jerry Brown on April 1. Here in Sonoma County and its surrounding area, though, the courses are better positioned.

Most of them, in fact, don’t use a drop of potable water.

Take the four facilities managed by the Tayman Park Golf Group, all of them nine-hole courses on public land. Fairgrounds Golf Course in Santa Rosa, Ukiah Municipal Golf Course and Healdsburg Golf Club at Tayman Park all are on well water. (Ukiah is making long-term plans to convert to treated wastewater.) McInnis Park Golf Center in San Rafael is already on recycled water, which is treated to the tertiary stage before being piped in.

WATER NO. 1 COURSE ISSUE

Harchut’s course in Bodega Bay uses wastewater, as does Northwood Golf Club in Monte Rio. Oakmont Golf Club and Fountaingrove Golf & Athletic Club both use well water for their playing surfaces. Jennifer Burke, deputy director of water and engineering resources for the City of Santa Rosa, says that not a single golf course uses city tap water for landscaping.

“I was at a conference in Palm Springs recently,” Harchut said. “Our company (KemperSports) manages 100 courses around the U.S. There were about 32 or 33 courses represented in Palm Springs, mainly from California, Oregon and Washington. They had a show of hands, and they asked how many golf courses were using potable water. One hand went up.”

But that doesn’t mean water isn’t a big issue for golf courses in the West. On the contrary, it’s usually the No. 1 item on the agenda these days.

The Professional Golfers’ Association of America and the United States Golf Association, the two most prominent organizations in the industry, have quietly been pushing water conservation for several years.

“We all kind of kid about it: Brown is the new green,” Fountaingrove Golf general manager Tim Eldridge said.

Practically upon arrival, some of the pro golfers at this year’s U.S. Open tournament at Chambers Bay, a course just outside of Tacoma, Wash., complained about the speed of the greens.

“That course will be brown, hard and firm,” Eldridge said before competition began Thursday. “They want to challenge the world’s best golfers, that’s definitely part of it. But indirectly they also want to show the golfing public that brown is OK. If Tiger Woods can play on it, you can, too.”

LOCAL COURSE ADVANTAGES

Every golf course in the Western United States is emphasizing water conservation these days, but our local courses have some advantages. Groundwater is generally healthy here; the aquifer underneath Santa Rosa is particularly strong. And while we have hot days in the Redwood Empire, it’s nothing like the withering sun of Palm Desert, or even the more inland sections of the East Bay. Eldridge says that when he worked at a golf course in Brentwood, just southeast of Antioch, there were times they dumped a million gallons of water on the course in a night.

We tend not to see that sort of usage in Sonoma County. And yet faced with an uncertain future, all of our local courses are trying to cut back.

The strategy tends to follow two paths. The first is to shrink the area of land that needs to be watered.

Oakmont is one course - or two courses, really, Oakmont East and Oakmont West - that’s nibbling into its acreage. On a recent mini-tour of the grounds, general manager Mike Ash pointed out several patches that the management (Oakmont is another KemperSports facility) had stopped mowing. These included out-of-play areas next to fairways, and landscaping around the clubhouse, both of which have returned to a state of valley-floor scruff.

It’s a little tricky for Ash, since some of these out-of-play areas happen to be the front yards of members’ houses arranged around the course.

“Honestly, I’ve been explaining more of why we’re a little brown in spots,” he said. “In fact, I haven’t had to talk to anybody about being green yet.”

The city of Santa Rosa’s Green Exchange program incentivizes the removal of lawn by offering $1 for every square foot of turf removed, up to 500 square feet for residential properties and up to 5,000 for commercial sites.

WATER DELIVERY MANAGED

Oakmont also has stopped serving water in the clubhouse restaurant unless requested, and has taken to cleaning its golf carts - that’s 80 carts, hit once or twice a day - with air compressors rather than water.

The other conservation tactic is to deliver water more efficiently to those acres that remain in turf. The solutions can be as simple as fixing faulty sprinkler heads and leaky pipes, but that’s just the start. Replacing thirsty rye grass with heartier fescue, deeper watering cycles, watering at night (or at least before noon), the use of wetting agents to increase water absorption - all of them are becoming commonplace.

Fountaingrove Golf Club employs two men - one works the front nine holes, one the back nine - to micromanage its water delivery. They keep the irrigation system in good order and prune trees that might otherwise catch sprinkler water in the air. Most important, they spend hours a day hand watering dry spots with hoses, a delivery system that is far less wasteful than sprinklers.

With the help of new technology, Fountaingrove goes even further.

Each day, superintendent Dustin McIntosh checks data on the California Irrigation Management Information System (CIMIS), and specifically its weather station in Bennett Valley, to check the day’s projected level of evaporation (from the ground) and transpiration (from plant leaves). He and his team then use something called a FieldScout soil moisture meter, which looks like a pogo stick with 3-inch metal prongs protruding from the bottom, to measure the moisture level in the course’s greens and fairways. This data can be used for hyper-localized watering.

And McIntosh is looking into a newer device, appropriately called the POGO, that works in a similar way but incorporates GPS mapping to provide an even clearer picture.

Fountaingrove waters its greens Sundays and Wednesdays, for a total of only 14 or 15 minutes per week.

It’s all contributing to significant reductions. According to Terry Crowley, utilities director for the City of Healdsburg, the Tayman Park course used about 13 acre-feet of water per month in 2013. Early numbers for 2015 show usage lowered by more than 40 percent.

And Tayman isn’t an outlier. But is any of it enough in the long term?

Currently, courses that use recycled water are doing their communities a favor, spraying treated wastewater that might otherwise have no useful place to go. But as we all learn to cut back, there will be less runoff going to treatment plants. And while Burke, the Santa Rosa water official, says the city isn’t seeing it yet, it’s easy to envision a day when there is more demand for recycled water. As it is, tertiary-stage treated water isn’t cheap. In Santa Rosa, the cost is 95 percent that of potable water.

CONSCIENTIOUS STEWARDS

As for wells, the restrictions mandated by Governor Brown apply to groundwater as well as city-piped water. Most counties aren’t metering well outflow yet, but that too could change.

The golfing industry has been proactive in describing its members as conscientious stewards. The USGA distributes a paper that details many of the benefits of turfgrass, including heat dissipation and prevention of soil erosion. And even most environmental advocates acknowledge the importance of recreational activities.

As noted by golf professional Jimmy Stewart, one of two partners in the Tayman Park Golf Group, their Healdsburg club was built in 1921 and is currently used by everyone from women’s clubs to the Sons In Retirement to the Healdsburg High boys and girls teams.

“At Healdsburg Golf Club, we are truly a ‘blue collar’ type of golf course that has a rich history of a tremendous amount of community service, life, recreation and activity over many years,” Stewart wrote in an email.

Still, these are golf courses we’re talking about. Right or wrong, they have always been seen as playgrounds of the privileged. And as water restrictions get tighter in California, those lush, sloping fairways are certain to drive a lot of debate.

Eldridge, for one, is confident in the long-term viability of the sport.

“I don’t think golf is going anywhere in its current guise,” the Fountaingrove GM said. “What we’ll see happening more - and it’s already happening - clubs that are not as financially stable will continue to fail and go away. They will be turned into residential housing and parks and vineyards. But there will always be a core group of golfers that have a place to play. They’ll just have fewer places.”