Water Takes Center Stage

When it comes to baseball stadiums and the top 100 films according to the American Film Institute (AFI), I want to see them all. Being a list kind of guy, those two are my guilty pleasures.

Unfortunately, a business trip to San Diego this week never even got me to first base at two-year-old Petco Field. The Padres were out of town. Until I visit Busch Stadium in St. Louis this summer, I'm stuck at 26 MLB stadiums.

The good news is that, upon returning to Cleveland from a water issues seminar sponsored by the San Diego Golf Course Superintendents Association (SDGCA), I immediately upped to 32 the number of top 100 films I've viewed.

Prompting a visit to Blockbuster was one of the conference speakers, Sandra Dunn, a California-based lawyer specializing in environmental issues. In detailing the historical "holiness" of water throughout the West, she cited the 1974 mystery "Chinatown."

Set in the 1930s, the Roman Polanski film — ranked No. 19 by AFI — delves into the world of shady water rights and land deals. Starring Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway and John Huston, it's definitely a classic (although I wouldn't have ranked it one spot ahead of another Nicholson gem, "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.").

More importantly, "Chinatown" really does substantiate the current efforts of the SDGCA and Southern California Golf Association (SCGA) in stressing the critical nature of water issues throughout the West. Water is gold in California, and golf course personnel had better be on their guard, even if the corruption that had tormented Nicholson's character, Jake Gittes, went down the drain years ago.

"If we're not the proactive ones, we're going to have a governmental agency come tell us, 'You need best management practices, and here's what they are,' " said Sandy Clark, the certified superintendent of Barona Creek Golf Club. "We have to be the engine. We can't be waiting till the tail end and wonder what that parade was that just marched over our head."

Ironically, Southern California is nearing the end of its third-wettest season in history. San Diego has received 22.4 inches of precipitation, ranking behind only 25.97 inches in 1883-84 and 24.74 inches in 1940-41.

"We cannot be lulled to sleep by one good rain year," said Clark, who organized and moderated the seminar, titled "The Day the Tap Ran Dry." "That was a hundred-year event that we saw, so I don't think we can comfortably say that we're back in business with water."

The four-hour conference, held at Lomas Santa Fe Country Club in Solana Beach, attracted about 100 superintendents, club managers and owners and featured several speakers in addition to Clark and Dunn. Among the highlights:

• Mark Moede, a local liaison of the National Weather Service, said Californians should heed the weather conditions known as El Nino and La Nina. El Nino seasons are caused by warm water near the equator and result in wetter and cooler conditions along the West Coast. Its inverse, La Nina, leads to drier and warmer conditions in the same area.

"The (systems) you want to key on when you watch the local news or surf the Internet are the status of the El Nino or La Nina," Moede said. "That's probably going to be your best way to determine water usage for the upcoming season."

Unfortunately for superintendents, the next three decades could bring an abundance of dry La Nina seasons. Moede described the phenomenon known as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, a series of 30-year cycles that rotate between El Nino and La Nina.

"What (forecasters) are saying is that we are coming to the end of a 30-year, mostly El Nino oscillation," Moede said. "They're thinking the trend is shifting to this pattern where more of our seasons over the next 30 years are going to be La Nina weather trends, which means typically less than normal amounts of rainfall."

Of course, that didn't prevent a few dry seasons over the last 30 years, including 5 inches of rain in 2003-04 and 3 inches in 2001-02.

"There are exceptions to the rule," Moede said. "But as a general rule — 70 percent of the time — you can expect this type of scenario during those El Nino or La Nina weather conditions."

• Noting the recent abundance of rainfall, Anatole Falagan, an official with the region's Metropolitan Water District (MWD), said, "What's critically important this year is that we're trying to store all this water."

Falagan said the MWD covers six counties and 5,200 square miles in Southern California, from Ventura to the Mexican border. Eighteen million people reside or work in the area, with an annual growth rate of 220,000 people.

Golf courses can do their parts to conserve water by adhering to the MWD's Innovative Supply Program, which has offered $250,000 in grants for concepts with the potential to provide new sources of drinking water in Southern California. The United States Golf Association (USGA) received a $50,000 grant to study golf course on-site recycling.

"Water recycling is typically associated with the county or city sanitation district," Falagan said. "We want to see how you can actually do on-site recycling, which means that you're located somewhere on the watershed and you're capturing that wastewater stream as it makes its way down."

With more than 320 golf courses in Southern California, the district and USGA are proposing that at least 250 of those courses use potable water by 2025. The result would be 100,000 acre-feet of savings — an acre-foot is about 326,000 gallons, and provides the needs of two typical Southern California families for a year — that would provide enough supply for 200,000 households, Falagan added.

"We're looking for big things out of this study," he said.

Falagan also said the MWD is offering incentives to courses that upgrade their irrigation systems and utilize detailed water budgets.

• Kevin Heaney, the assistant executive director of the SCGA and a representative of the lobbyist group California Alliance for Golf, said many golf course personnel are still a bit apathetic when it comes to water issues.

"They think perhaps the biggest issue confronting golf is the hot golf ball and how the elite players are hitting that hot golf ball and how it's making golf courses obsolete," he said. "I guarantee you that that is an issue in golf, but that's certainly not the biggest threat to golf. We think water is our single biggest concern at this point, and that's where the California Alliance for Golf is focusing most of its efforts.

"In the big picture, golf isn't using much water. However, it's also a very visible use of water, and when people are concerned about water, and if their water is restricted at all, the first people they are going to point at is the golf course down the street because we do, unfortunately, still have the image of being the fat cats."

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