The drama surrounding California's water woes sounds like the plot for a Hollywood film. In fact, it is.Water in California is a system wrought with politics and intrigue, and was the subject for the 1974 Oscar-nominated film Chinatown that revealed the underbelly of the struggle to secure water rights in early 20th century Los Angeles.
Like any movie, the tale of water in California has all the essential ingredients of a good cliffhanger: plot, protagonists, antagonists, crisis and conflict. The one ingredient it seems to be missing is resolution.
Found smack in the middle of this adventure are some 1,100 golf courses, nearly all of which are struggling to get enough water to keep players happy, yet seem to have too much to suit a general public uber-aware of the state's many environmental issues. Finding a balance between the two has been so impossible that if it were left to any of Hollywood's iconic directors to depict in a believable manner in a motion picture, they'd likely be so far over schedule and over budget they'd never find work again.
For those reasons, it might appear to some that the golf industry in California does not approach water issues with the same zeal and purpose that has become the norm in other water-challenged states. But rest assured, the state's golf industry has been a proactive leader on water-use issues for years. And that isn't easy in a place with so many inherent challenges.
When factions in the golf industry from other states have developed self-imposed best management practices regulating water use, they were able to do so partly because there are so few regulating agencies to satisfy. For example, in Florida, where golf courses have been able to become BMP-certified since 2007, five entities manage water resources for more than 19 million people statewide. In Georgia, the state's GCSA chapter built a water BMP certification template for courses around the state in the face of widespread drought in 2007. Its efforts had to pass the Georgia Department of Natural Resources and the governor's office.
By contrast, there are more than 3,000 water districts in California governing collection, distribution and pricing of water from myriad sources to nearly 40 million users across the state. Some of those purveyors serve millions of customers, while others are miniscule in comparison, providing water to a handful of users. All operate under their own guidelines.
Through the years, factions within the golf industry have come together to create task forces in Los Angeles, San Diego, the Coachella Valley and most recently Sacramento in an effort to give the game a voice with regional water agencies throughout the state.
"It's very complicated here," said Craig Keller, director of government affairs for the Southern California GCSA. "It's not only complicated; it's also very sophisticated."
Indeed.
Californians get their water from several sources, including the Colorado River, local groundwater and recycled water from water-treatment plants. And then there is the State Water Project, which provides water for nearly 70 percent of all Californians. The project is a system of 700 miles of canals, aqueducts and pipelines that channel water from 34 reservoirs to more the 25 million users throughout the state, including large metropolitan areas like Los Angeles and San Francisco.
"We've already cut back 20 percent. Twenty percent plus another 20 percent? Golf course superintendents don't want to get measured on what they're already cutting. We want to be measured by the historical norm. With 40 percent cutbacks, you would be hurt. You'd have to think about reducing acreage."
And the state's water supply is under siege from drought, competition for access and pricing, making it a challenging time for golf courses, agriculture and private residential users statewide.
Ongoing drought in the North, which supplies water to much of the rest of the state, is taking its toll statewide (the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission recently raised rates by 50 percent on all users) and threatens to supercede voluntary water-saving efforts by superintendents that have been in place for years.
According to the California Department of Water Resources, 2013 was the driest year on record since California attained statehood in 1850. That lack of precipitation along with rising temperatures also has affected snow pack in the Sierra Nevada, which contributes to much of the state's water supply.
The State Water Project accounts for nearly half the water supplied to the city of Los Angeles through a century-old system of pipeline and aqueducts. And much of that water comes from Sierra Nevada snow pack, which was at 30 percent of the historic average during this past winter, according to the California Department of Water Resources.
According to CDWR, 22 of the state's 47 reservoirs monitored on the department's web site are operating at capacities of 50 percent or lower. Only 11 are near capacity.
For example, Folsom Lake near Sacramento is operating at 46 percent of capacity. It only is that high because of relief provided by spring rains. Water levels in the reservoir dipped to as low as 19 percent of capacity in 2013 and dropped to 17 percent in early 2014, revealing an old mining community that had been submerged for 58 years.
These numbers have not gone unnoticed in Sacramento where Gov. Jerry Brown, in April, signed a drought emergency declaration that, among other measures, carries a mandatory reduction in outdoor water use by private residences and urges golf courses to "limit the use of potable water for irrigation."
That declaration came on the heels of a similar measure in January that included an order from Brown directing golf courses to "immediately implement water reduction plans to reduce the use of potable water for outdoor irrigation."
"California is unique in a lot of ways. Agriculture made the state, but the gold rush made it grow up too quickly. ... Some, literally, are still operating on the same rules that miners gunslinged out years ago."
Many local agencies already have implemented their own water-saving restrictions, making it difficult to tell just what the governor's directive means, if anything.
"You can go all over the state and to all of these crazy situations and naturally golf gets thrown into the middle of it," said Mike Huck, a former golf course superintendent and now a water conservation consultant for the golf and landscape industries. "Turf has been a bone of contention for a lot of people for a long time."
Being a proactive bunch, superintendents at many of the state's 1,100 golf courses already have been operating under voluntary water-use cutbacks of up to 20 percent for as many as four years. They're worried that additional mandatory restrictions will come on top of the voluntary cutbacks already in place if the drought persists into 2015.
"Government officials, they don't know what we as superintendents do," said Jim Ferrin, director of landscapes for Sun City Roseville, a 27-hole golf community near Sacramento.
"We've already cut back 20 percent. Twenty percent plus another 20 percent? Golf course superintendents don't want to get measured on what they're already cutting. We want to be measured by the historical norm. With 40 percent cutbacks, you would be hurt. You'd have to think about reducing acreage."
Golf courses aren't the only entities using less water nowadays, says Keller, who has served as SoCal's director of government affairs for five years.
By nature, Californians are supportive of many environmental issues, and he says water utilities, state government and individual users deserve some credit for their conservation efforts. The state's population has doubled in the last half-century, and in that time, statistics show that 4 million people in Los Angeles used less water in 2010 than 2 million people used in 1970. Selling the merits of such stewardship to golfers statewide, however, has been more challenging.
"I almost feel funny saying this, but we have to lower our maintenance standards," Keller said. "But conditioning gets amped up more and more. That has been the trend for years. We have to keep up with our neighbors."
Although conserving water is important and necessary, water is big business in California, and scaling back use affects the bottom line for those who sell it.
Some water-governing agencies are tiny, regulating water use to just a handful of users, while others are massive, like the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation.
LADWP provides water resources to nearly 4 million users in Los Angeles. Mandatory cutbacks of 20 percent could cost LADWP as much as $150 million.
The Met, the country's largest public utility, is a consortium of 26 municipalities and water districts that bring water to a staggering 19 million residents in six Southern California counties.
The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, a division of the U.S. Department of the Interior, manages water distribution to agricultural users in the state's fertile interior through the Central Valley Project. Water shortages there have been so severe that earlier this year the Fed completely cut off water for Central Valley farmers.
"It's convoluted as to who is going to be in trouble if there are cutbacks," Huck said. "It comes down to the individual water districts and water purveyors."
Many of the smaller providers still operate with an Old West mentality carved out more than 150 years ago. Some even continue to measure flow in what is known as miner's inches, a measurement of flow first employed to quantify water use in hydraulic mining during the 19th century gold rush era. Even more peculiar, a miner's inch in Northern California is the same as in Oregon and Nevada, but different than a miner's inch in Southern California.
"California is unique in a lot of ways," Ferrin said. "Agriculture made the state, but the gold rush made it grow up too quickly.
"Some, literally, are still operating on the same rules that miners gunslinged out years ago."
That Old World way of thinking can be a problem for a state that leads the country with a population of more than 37 million (nearly twice the population of New York, the country's third most populous state), is third in geographic size spanning more than 158,000 square miles (Florida would fit into California nearly three times) and stretches nearly 800 miles north to south.
"Once, I was like Chicken Little. I kept telling people, 'It's coming,' and no one believed it. Now, it's hitting us with both barrels. Now, I'm saying 'I told you so.' "
Because of its size, proximity to the Pacific and topography that includes mountains and valleys from one corner of the state to the other, California has microclimates unlike any other U.S. locale. Weather conditions can vary wildly even on the same golf course, such as Pacific Grove Golf Links on Monterey Peninsula.
The original nine holes at Pacific Grove wind through a tree-lined residential neighborhood, where golfers often encounter warm, sunny conditions. The second nine jut out onto the peninsula's extreme northwestern corner on land once occupied by a U.S. Coast Guard station, and can be enveloped in fog for much of the day. Each nine can have different irrigation needs on the same day depending on the weather.
Nowhere in the state have golf courses faced scrutiny like they have in the Coachella Valley region that includes Palm Springs and Palm Desert, neither of which would exist to the extent they do today without the golf industry.
Still, virtually all of the 124 courses there have come under fire from local media sources and non-golfing residents whose home values are directly tied to the industry they bemoan. Ironically, residential use in the Coachella Valley is among the highest in California, according to the Desert Water Agency.
According to the Coachella Valley Water District, more than 20 courses in the valley use recycled water or a mix that also includes Colorado River water. Twenty-nine courses take water directly from the Colorado and 73 others pump groundwater. The goal is to eventually get at least 50 courses in the valley on recycled water.
While factions within golf have tried to tackle water issues on a regional basis, some insiders acknowledge the industry could do more to help itself. For example, there has been no grassroots effort to organize on a statewide level, and doing so could help educate state legislators and water district officials from San Diego in the south to Yreka near the Oregon border. Huck said he has been preaching for years the need for the golf business to organize statewide in the event of a water doomsday event.
"California, which usually starts trends, well, we lag behind in this," Huck said. "We have no comprehensive plan for water management for golf courses.
"Once, I was like Chicken Little. I kept telling people, 'It's coming,' and no one believed it. Now, it's hitting us with both barrels. Now, I'm saying 'I told you so.' "