THE WAITING GAME 

September is the month when we learn which among the many bills sent to Governor Newsom in  unified form by both houses of the state legislature become law, which are directly vetoed, and  which are pocket vetoed. 

Governor Newsom has signed thirteen (13) bills that purport to make it easier to build housing in  California, including “affordable” housing. Housing is generally tapped by residents as the state’s  most critical need – a need followed in short order by retail crime, which is also the subject of  Proposition 36 on November’s ballot, and water. 

It’s the water that most interests California’s golf sector. While there are multiple bills in the  Governor’s queue concerning various aspects of state water law and policy (e.g., AB 460, AB 2257,  AB 1827, AB 1828, AB 805, AB 2454, AB 2875, SB 1304), there is one bill that the statewide golf  sector identified early on as separating one side of the state’s water divide from the other – from  those interests fixated on conservation as the focus of future supply and those intent on pursuing a  more diversified portfolio – from those who are often accused of believing that California can  conserve its way out of its aridification predicament and those who are convinced that if  conservation is the only tool in the state’s water resiliency toolbox, California is doomed to be  hollowed out in much the same way rust belt cities like Pittsburgh and Detroit were in the last  quarter of the 20th Century. It’s a divide that some have the luxury of navigating by posturing, some  are forced to navigate by the practical demands of their livelihoods, and some try to navigate by a balancing act that though once common, seems to have all but disappeared from today’s body  politic. 

That bill is SB 366 (Caballero; D-Merced / Bipartisan bill / Co-authors in Assembly Essalyi and  Rubio) – California Water Plan: Long Term Supply Targets. In a nutshell, SB 366 would require the  California Department of Water Resources (DWR) to coordinate with the California Water  Commission, the State Water Resources Control Board, other state, and federal agencies as  appropriate, and an expanded stakeholder advisory committee to develop a comprehensive plan  for addressing the state’s water needs and meeting specified long-term water supply targets  established by the bill for purposes of The California Water Plan. The bill would go beyond the  current approach to water supply planning by establishing specific targets to be met by certain  dates and requires a financing plan for achieving these targets. In addition, the Plan would require  the state to plan to add 9 million-acre-feet to that “specific target” by 2040.  

This would be the first water target enshrined in California law. To put that in context, there are 81  separate targets aimed at decarbonizing the state. Golf is cognizant of many of them as facilities  switch from gas powered equipment to electric powered equipment that is often less reliable but  virtually always more expensive.  

With the addition of some late amendments to the bill meant to calm the fears of environmentalists  that some of that additional 9 million-acre-feet of supply would come from the Sacramento Delta,  we believe that Governor Newsom will sign the bill into law. Legislators have the luxury of single minded advocacy on issues they deem dear to the hearts of their political bases often on the theory  that someone or something else will balance their advocacy against the advocacy of those on the  other side of various divides. Chief executives have to make things work, or if you prefer a phrase  that was once considered beyond the realm of American respectability – making the trains run on  time. Or as Gavin Newsom’s predecessor Jerry Brown defined the role – paddling down the middle  of a great river, sometimes paddling left, sometimes right, in an effort to keep the ship of state from  running aground. 

Nothing underscores that point while at the same time providing credence to our conclusion about  Newsom signing SB 366 into law than the press release he put out last Friday exulting in the  expeditious way an appellate court’s upholding of a trial court’s rejection of a CEQA challenge to  the Sites Reservoir has cleared one of the last, if not the last, hurdle to the construction of a  reservoir that will supply 3 million households with clean drinking water.  

The Governor’s exultation was as much procedural as it was substantive. The release touted how  his SB 149, which Newsom sponsored, led to a quick decision to consider all environmental  challenges and in this case reject them in their entirety and move forward.  

SB 149 works as follows: 

▪ It allows the Governor to certify qualifying infrastructure projects for judicial streamlining  under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). 

▪ Courts must decide CEQA challenges to certified projects within 270 days to the extent  feasible – saving months or even years of litigation delays after a project has already passed  environmental review, while still allowing legal challenges to be heard.

“We can’t waste any more time with frivolous lawsuits to hold up major infrastructure projects,  especially building more water storage,” said Governor Newsom in the release. To which we might  add, we can’t shy away from water supply targets just because we fear they may end up  documenting our failure to fully achieve them, as if partial achievement doesn’t represent progress. 

We might also add that if last week’s report of the California Air Resources Board (CARB) is any  indication, targets do work. They do represent progress, even if more incremental than epochal. California’s emissions of carbon dioxide shrank by 9.3 million metric tons in 2022, the equivalent of  removing 2.2 million gas-powered vehicles from the road for a year – a statistic made more  significant by the fact that those reductions occurred during a year when the economy grew. Does  that put the state on track to meet what are overly ambitious 2040 targets? No; although these  things do have a way of accelerating over time to the degree to which a positive feedback loop is  sometimes generated.  

Would SB 366 guarantee that the state increase supply by 9 million-acre-feet notwithstanding the  effects of aridification in the Sierra Nevada and Colorado Basin? No, but creating and then focusing  on such a goal, any goal for that matter, holds out the hope for at least partial achievement.  Aspiration stimulates innovation, and no sector more than golf understands the role innovation has  played in reducing water consumption. The same applies to the production side of the equation.  And it is going to take both for golf and other water consumptive sectors to continue to thrive in the  arid Southwest.  

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CAG suggested that the great lesson from last year’s legislative session was “to heed labor’s roar.”  On so many fronts the 2023 session yielded many of labor’s long held goals – e.g., separate, and  much higher minimum wages for the fast food and healthcare sectors, expansions in sick  day/family leave mandates. 2023 also yielded a bill ultimately vetoed by Governor Newsom to  allow striking workers to collect unemployment insurance. 

As for 2024, while Assemblymember Ash Kalra (D-San Jose) was quoted in the Los Angeles Times as characterizing his own legislative record on union-friendly proposals this year as “a blood bath,”  labor’s yield was not that dire. But it was a long cry from the previous few years. This year’s version  of a bill to provide striking workers unemployment benefits, something the State of New York does  provide on a limited basis, flamed out before it made it to the Governor’s desk. Legislation written  by Assembly Appropriations Chair Buffy Wicks (D-Oakland) and strongly supported by journalist  unions to require Google to pay news outlets for content was shelved in lieu of a watered-down  deal. Bills to support grocery jobs over self-check-out machines, expand protections for workers  who join picket lines, and limit government agencies’ use of temporary contracts to replace union  jobs similarly failed to gain traction. 

Don’t take the wrong lesson from this. Labor remains a dominant force in Sacramento. It’s just that  a $73 billion deficit that everyone understands is more structural than temporal is also a dominant  force – one that will continue to impose discipline in differentiating priorities, something golf has to  take into consideration if it determines to run a truncated version of a failed 2024 bill (AB 2947) in  2025 that would have encouraged/enabled incentives for turf conversions. If it costs the state any  appreciable money, it’s likely to fail in Appropriations just as AB 2947 did. 

For those thinking that continued deficits might spark a reform of the state’s tax system to eliminate  the volatility created by an overdependence upon income and goods-based sales taxes by putting service taxes on the table for consideration, you might want to consider just how much political risk  such consideration would pose for any politician brave enough to suggest it. That subject is more  likely to be broached by the same death by a thousand cuts that CEQA is being curtailed than it is to  be broached by the kind of massive reform that Bob Hertzberg proposed year after year during his  term in the State Senate – year after year to no more effect than stone cold silence from his  colleagues. When Jerry Brown tagged CEQA reform as “God’s work,” everyone interpreted that as  his assignment of the highest of priority and importance to the task. In hindsight he may have  meant that only God had the stuff to tackle the environmental opposition sure to ensue.  

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It’s too early to draw final conclusions about the 2024 legislative session. But it’s not too early to  suggest that if we are right about Governor Newsom signing SB 366 into law, we will be able to  conclude that water has joined housing as one of the priorities capable of justifying intense focus  as well as increased spending in a fiscal environment disciplined by deficits.   

THE LAST ORANGE GROVE IN LOS ANGELES

When the City of Los Angeles approves Borstein Enterprises’ application for the construction of 21  luxury homes in the San Fernando Valley neighborhood of Tarzana, there will be no more citrus  groves in the county that was for the 1^st half of the 20^th Century the top agricultural county in the  nation. While the application proposes to preserve much of acreage as open space, none of it will  be devoted to farming. All that will remain will be two rows of citrus trees on the west side of one of  the tract’s streets to remind future generations of what once was.  

Should Angeles National Golf Club, located in a riverbed in a northeast corner of Los Angeles that is  so remote that most don’t know it is within the city’s limits ever close, the same story could be  written for daily fee golf in the nation’s second largest city. Once dotted with multiple daily fee golf 

courses and driving/practice ranges, Los Angeles is down to just this one. All other golf properties  are either private clubs or municipal parkland facilities.  

Agriculture and golf have two things very much in common. Both require large tracts of land, and  both cannot compete economically with almost all other forms of residential and/or commercial  development. The difference is that citrus can be grown in plenty of places in this huge state, while  golf courses need to be reasonably close to where golfers live and work.  

There is a compelling case to be made for keeping them within earshot of the roughly 3 million  Californians who play golf, but the “case” is not an economic one. It’s the case for recreation,  school sports, charitable fund raising, green space, permeability, environmental sustainability, heat  relief – all distinguished economically only in terms of being the one active recreational activity in  the public sector that generates net revenues that offset the taxpayer contributions that would  otherwise be necessary to support other public sector amenities.  

Golf has certainly made that non-economic case effectively both statewide and locally (those two  failed “public golf endangerment acts” and myriad local repurposing efforts). Golf needs to keep  making it, because there is no shortage of those who make the economic case against golf. And  many of them are not who or what you may think. Consider the following from a recent FORBES  Online story that debunks a meme about Kamala Harris having proposed an excise tax on all golf  related products, services, and activities parallel to similar excise taxes on other products/services  but debunks its veracity by suggesting all the reasons why it would be an excellent idea: 

“. . . golf courses also raise land use concerns. In many urban and suburban areas, courses  may occupy valuable real estate that could potentially be used for other purposes that  would generate more property tax revenue or benefit a broader segment of the population.  The exclusivity of golf as a sport means these large green spaces in the center of town are  often reserved for a relatively small and affluent subset of the population, raising social  equity and use of public resource concerns. Those spaces would generate more property  tax revenue if used for housing or commercial space and would be of more use to the  general community if reserved for public leisure.” 

When conservative business publications begin echoing the same arguments that Malcolm  Gladwell and “progressive” tax/legal critics have long been raising, it means that these arguments, once provinces of a distinct side of the political aisle, are moving into the mainstream. It means  more than anything else that golf needs to be vigilant and smart – vigilant in terms of paying great  heed to these critics and their criticisms – smart in terms of avoiding the critical error known as  making the other side’s argument for them. If golf suggests that it be judged by an economic  calculus that adjudges it a lesser and lower use, it will be thus judged, and golf won’t like the verdict.

September 18, 2024

Article provided by SCGA Public Affairs Team

Sacramento

September is when we find out which among the thousands of bills that legislators filed at the beginning of the year are signed into law by the governor. Just as the Assembly and Senate were under a firm deadline (August 31) to approve identical versions of bills for consideration in this session, Governor Newsom is under a firm deadline (September 30) to sign or veto them, a handful of which become law immediately, most of which become law January 1, and a few of which go into effect July 1.

To summarize what we have shared voluminously over the course of this year, every bill golf opposed has not made it to the governor’s desk, every bill golf opposed unless amended in a specific way has been thus amended, one bill we strongly supported (SB 366) has made it to the governor’s desk, and one bill we merely watched for what it portends for the unraveling of long established water rights (AB 460) has also made it to the governor’s desk.

As we stated in our last update, “we should be encouraged by just how well the golf community again fared in Sacramento. The reception the allied golf community again received from Members, Staffers, and agencies made clear that the game’s stock continues to rise in Sacramento. And all told, this should give the golf community confidence that the advocacy tools it has developed in recent years can be sharpened if necessary to continue coping with whatever Mother Nature and human institutions throw its way.”

That’s a teaser for some news about the upgrading of the California Alliance for Golf (CAG) we expect to share with you in short order. Today, a “tease.” Details to follow.

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While we await those gubernatorial signatures and those CAG “details to follow,” we would like to add to the sunny optimism suffusing both with a couple of encouraging updates from the municipal realm (Ventura and San Diego) and a summary of what a golf community can achieve when it engages for a long period of time with its most important regulatory agency (Coachella Valley Water District).

In reverse order, we start with what the golf community in the Coachella Valley (home to 121 golf clubs/courses) has managed to accomplish for itself in the decade since the SCGA organized that community into an institutionalized partnership with the Coachella Valley Water District (CVWD) – an institution called the “Coachella Valley Golf & Water Task Force.”

Coachella Valley Golf & Water Task Force

The CVWD Golf & Water Task Force was organized by the SCGA 10 years ago to create a partnership between the Valley golf community and the Water District for the purposes of meeting the conservation goals of the Coachella Valley Water Management Plan and facilitating the substitution of Colorado River water for groundwater.

Composed of allied associations, golf facilities, industry experts, CVWD staff, and two of the five elected members of the CVWD Board, the Task Force meets bimonthly with additional occasional meetings to work on specific tasks.

While the overarching benefit of the institution has been the forging of collaborative and trusting relationships between the Valley golf community, CVWD staff, the Board, and local media, the key accomplishments over the 10-year life of the body have included:

• Creation of a new and lower rate for users of canal water (Colorado River) in the East Valley to eliminate the disincentive created by a widening gap between the East Valley RAC rate and the canal rate;
• Use of debt instruments to finance the extension of the mid-valley pipeline in lieu of a pay-as-you-go methodology;
• Creation of three (3) rounds of turf and other rebates, the first such rebates for golf in the Valley;
• Partnered on a $9.1 million incentive program grant with the US Bureau of Reclamation;
• Use of 5-year averaging methodology to establish compliance with conservation goals in lieu of using specific baseline years;
• Expedition of pipeline hookups to wean courses off pumping;
• A reversal of media fortune, as golf in the Valley has gone from the sector that put “the aquifer at risk” to the sector that is making a good faith effort to cooperate with all other sectors to bring the aquifer into stasis – a goal that the region did achieve in 2020;
• Significant input into the projections and underpinnings of the current Coachella Valley Water Management Plan that CVWD and its fellow water agencies in the Valley (e.g., DWA) has submitted to the state as the region’s formal Groundwater Sustainability Plan under the terms of California’s Groundwater Sustainability Act (2014) – the document that is to guide the region’s water strategy for the next two generations.
• Provided significant input into the “Salt & Nutrient Management Plan” mandated by California’s Groundwater Sustainability Act to reflect turf’s accurate Nitrogen assimilation factor (97%) to deflect what was on its way to being fodder for criticism of the sector for polluting the groundwater table.
• Collaborated on development of a massive mapping project RFP to acquire the data necessary for the water district to make effective state and federal grant applications for golf industry rebates/incentives, and to make fair and accurate budgets under California’s Groundwater Sustainability Act. 

That’s a lot of “accomplishments,” all of which have proven of incalculable value to the 100 plus golf courses in the California desert, many of which will prove indispensable as things tighten along the Colorado River and mandates from Sacramento arrive with increasing frequency.

The Task Force meets again next Wednesday to continue creating mutual benefit for the Valley golf community and CVWD. The point of sharing this story, other than what is obvious from this long list of “key accomplishments” is to hammer home the following two (2) characteristics of ALL effective advocacy efforts:

1. The effort must be organized and institutionalized.
2. The effort is all about the long-distance run, not the sprint.

The ad hoc effort is almost always the losing effort. Effective advocacy is more presence and persistence than it is genius – a version of Thomas Edison’s dictum about inventiveness being 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.

The CVWD Golf & Water Task Force is not the only such collaborative effort between a golf community and a water agency. The one in Los Angeles may meet less frequently but is arguably as impactful. And next month the SCGA Public Affairs team meets with the leadership of another large water agency to establish another major “golf & water task force.”

Buenaventura Municipal Golf Course

A mainstay of Ventura golf for 92 years, the Buenaventura Municipal Golf Course has been closed since January 2023. That is when torrential rainstorms caused the Santa Clara River to overflow, carrying massive amounts of debris and sediment onto the golf course that did not recede as it had during previous flood events. Like many municipal golf courses in Southern California, Buenaventura is in a flood plain.

In May of 2023, the city retained a golf course architect to prepare plans for full restoration of the golf course but discovered that for a variety of reasons not fully understood, full restoration alone would not be capable of preventing continued flooding. Some in the city used that discovery to advocate for the closure of the golf course. However, Ventura’s public golf community, particularly the members of the golf clubs at Buenaventura and Olivas Links, the city’s other municipal golf course, advocated strongly for finding alternative ways to restore the 92-year-old mainstay. They attended Council meetings, wrote letters, hounded the media, and engaged the assistance of the SCGA in their effort.

That “effort” came full circle last week when the Ventura City Council voted unanimously to award a contract to develop a scope of work that considers the hydraulics of the adjacent river, identifies potential flood mitigation measures, protects the integrity of the golf property, evaluates different course structures/routings/holes, vets potential new revenue streams – all in an updated golf course design consistent with the footprint available after application of whatever additional mitigation measures are revealed by the study.

In addition, the golfers asked for direct input into the process of updating that golf design per whatever constraints are discovered, or perhaps not discovered as the case may end up being upon completion of the study. That request was granted. Beyond this project, Council sanctioned the resurrection of the Citizen Golf Advisory Group that had lapsed during COVID – something many who testified before Council also requested. Whatever emerges once the needs of flood mitigation are balanced against the city’s resolve to restore normative golf on the site, it is clear that the Ventura golf community has earned a seat at the table where that balancing act will be finalized. It is equally clear that whatever sentiment there had been for simply closing the course or repurposing it as a passive park was trumped by a level of citizen golfer engagement that we have not always seen but are increasingly seeing from Azusa to Duarte to Carson to Palm Springs to La Verne to Los Angeles’ Sepulveda Basin to Brea to San Diego, the subject of our next foray into exemplary citizen golfer engagement.

Mission Bay Golf Course

To make a very long story short, after more than eight (8) years of managing to preserve the full integrity of San Diego’s Mission Bay executive golf course & practice facility in the city’s Mission Bay Master Plan, the San Diego golf community lost out to a combination of other active recreational amenities and wetland preservation in the “vision plan” that was established by the San Diego City Council as the starting point of the “General Development Plan” (GDP) that will soon get underway to determine a final plan for the De Anza Cove section of the Mission Bay Park in which the Mission Bay golf facility is located.

During those eight (8) years, a group of dedicated San Diego golfers, including many who have served and, in some cases, still serve on the San Diego City Council’s Municipal Golf Committee, attended scores of public meetings in defense of San Diego’s exemplar of affordable, accessible, junior/school centric golf. But so did devotees of camping, boating, baseball, soccer, open space, and wetland restoration. In the penultimate analysis – not the final analysis because that is yet to come during the GDP process – not all could get what they wanted nor what they were promised by members of the City Council. Given the need, a need acknowledged by all; to restore some of the wetlands, it just wasn’t possible within the remnant footprint. Bottom line: The political powers concluded that upsetting the golf community would be their least objectionable option.

Thus, was born the “Save Mission Bay Golf Course Coalition,” the details of which, according to the basic “mission” document they put together, are as follows:

WHO: A concerned group of organizations and individuals, including but not limited to:

• SD CIF Section High School Golf Teams
• San Diego Junior Golf Association
• Pro Kids Academy / First Tee of San Diego
• San Diego Municipal Golf Committee
• Southern California PGA Section (SCPGA)
• Southern California Golf Association (SCGA)

WHAT: A coalition whose sole purpose is to protect the accessible, affordable, and complete municipal golf course experience which the Mission Bay Golf Course (MBGC) has provided to generations of San Diegans of all age groups, to the greatest extent possible given competing priorities imposed by the De Anza Cove Amendment to the Mission Bay Park Master Plan (MBPMP). We seek to preserve the integral role played by the facility by continuing to create new generations of local golfers, providing San Diego schools with a golf facility indispensable to their continued ability to host junior golf teams and programs, and continuing to function as a unique and irreplaceable resource for older and working San Diego golfers.

WHY: The planning process attendant to implementing the MBPMP as recently amended requires that park stakeholders be prepared to work collaboratively and in a spirit of compromise to ensure that active recreational users are able continue to provide their sports programs and enjoy the usage of this parkland given that the City of San Diego now proposes to convert substantial acreage to wetland.   This Coalition is formed in the spirit of constructive collaboration coupled with a firm commitment to preserve the core purpose of the MBGC as a unique 18-hole executive golf facility in all of San Diego.

HOW: By working with the other active/passive recreational, environmental, and commercial stakeholders to determine the amount of acreage which might end up being available to the MBGC once other stakeholder needs and priorities are preliminarily identified and negotiated, the coalition then anticipates the city retaining necessary professional services to determine how the proposed remaining parcel might be redesigned/reimagined to maintain a fully functional 18-hole executive golf course that includes practice facilities similar to the facilities provided today.

VISION: The “Save Mission Bay Golf Course” coalition pledges to operate at all times in a spirit of compromise, shared sacrifice, and respect for the other interests and stakeholders whose recreational claims, virtues, and values are as important to the residents of San Diego as the utility, virtues and values of MBGC are to the San Diego golf community – a commitment to the preservation of as much of the MBGC’s current value as required to maintain current levels of functionality and community resonance while accommodating certain constraints imposed by the De Anza Cove Amendment to the MBPMP.

The “Coalition” put together a comprehensive “fact” sheet that explains the value this San Diego golf gem has provided generations of San Diegans. Click here to read it.

The Coalition plans to secure signatures of San Diego devotees of the heavily played facility, both in person and per a QR Code that will allow for offsite signature gathering. If you are a San Diego municipal golfer, you are sure to see it one way or the other.

What was lost at the last minute in the “vision” process can easily be recaptured in the coming GDP process – whether in whole or part. It won’t be easy, but as today’s headline makes clear, “when golf organizes and advocates, it wins.” And this effort is organized, and its advocates have already demonstrated the passion and perseverance to match if not exceed the passion and perseverance of the other interests sure to be involved in the GDP process.

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We will continue to share the myriad challenges the golf community faces, many of them critical, because it’s important to know and then face head-on what’s coming our way. But we would be remiss if we didn’t also share all the ways the golf community continues to meet and overcome them.

– SCGA Public Affairs Team

PUBLIC AFFAIRS NEWSLETTER 

Where Golf and Public Policy Intersect 

[August 2024] 

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IT ALWAYS COMES BACK TO WATER 

Three things of long-term significance for the California golf community occurred last week, all of  them involving water:  

1. The Assembly and Senate performed their second and final “great culling” of 2024 by  moving some bills off suspense and holding others in committee, with those escaping their  respective Appropriations Committee Suspense Files almost certain to move forward to the  Governor for his signature or veto and those held in committee dead for the year. The bills  golf was most interested in involved water. 

2. The Imperial Irrigation District (IID) announced that it was giving back 700-million-acre feet  of its Colorado River allocation each of the next 3 years while it and the other agencies in  the seven (7) states in the Colorado Compact agree to a set of permanent reductions  beginning in 2026 to accommodate the Basin’s reduced water production. 

3. The California Department of Water Resources (DWR) released its annual “State Water  Project Delivery Capability Report” that increased the percentage decrease of that  “capability” over the next 20 years to 13% on the low end and 23% on the high end, the 3^rd

year in a row in which those numbers were increased, a trend reflected by other academic  studies released in the last year. 

The Great Culling – What Came off Appropriations Suspense Files and What Didn’t 

Two (2) bills that CAG was watching with great interest to see whether they survived their respective  Appropriations processes – one a bill CAG strongly supported, one a bill CAG was tracking, and  both strong harbingers of the trajectory of California water law and policy – did come off suspense  and move to floor votes that will occur sometime between now and end of session the 1^st week of  September.  

SB 366 (Caballero; D-Merced)  

In late May CAG reported that “It isn’t often that one bill can highlight all that separates one side of  California’s great water divide from the other – from those interests fixated on conservation as the  focus of future supply and those intent on pursuing a more diversified portfolio – from those who  are often accused of believing that California can conserve its way out of its aridification  predicament and those who are convinced that if conservation is the only tool in the state’s water  resiliency toolbox, California is doomed to be hollowed out in much the same way rust belt cities  like Pittsburgh and Detroit were in the last quarter of the 20th Century.”  

SB 366 was that bill. Tagged “California Water Plan: Long Term Supply Targets,” SB 366 would revise  and recast certain provisions regarding The California Water Plan to, among other things, require  the department to coordinate with the California Water Commission, the State Water Resources  Control Board, other state and federal agencies as appropriate, and a stakeholder advisory  committee to develop a comprehensive plan for addressing the state’s water needs and meeting  specified long-term water supply targets established by the bill for purposes of The California Water  Plan. It would go beyond the current approach to water supply planning by establishing for the 1st  time in the history of the state specific targets to be met by certain dates and requires a financing  plan for achieving these targets.

Given that the California golf community’s long-term interest lies with the side of the “great water  divide” that finds conservation to be an important but by no means the only tool in the state’s water  resiliency toolbox, the California Alliance for Golf (CAG) joined more than 100 hundred other  organizations in support of the bill when it was heard in the Assembly Water, Parks, and Wildlife  Committee in June, where it passed through on a unanimous bipartisan 13-0 vote. 

When Senator Caballero presented her bill to the Assembly Committee in June, she noted that  California had already adopted 81 targets in support of electrifying and otherwise decarbonizing the  state, making it more than reasonable to adopt targets for the supply of something as vital to the  sustainability of the state as water. She cited the same UCLA/UC Merced/UC Davis study that the  bill’s sponsor (California Municipal Utilities Association) cited in their support of the bill –“The  Magnitude of California’s Water Challenges” – a study that makes a strong case that changed  climactic conditions in the Sierra Nevada and Colorado Basin all but guarantee that California is  looking at somewhere between a 10 and 20 percent loss of supply by 2050. Without focusing on  certain 21st Century supply modes (e.g., storm water capture, aquifer recharge, reuse – potable  and non-potable, desalination) in addition to continuing to ramp up all forms of conservation, the  state won’t be able to thrive.  

As amended subsequent to that Assembly committee hearing to assuage the criticisms of  environmental organizations concerned that some of the “supply” envisaged by the bill might come  at the expense of the water used to maintain the environmental integrity of the Sacramento Delta,  SB 366 moved to Assembly Appropriations where last Thursday it moved off Suspense and forward  to what is almost certain to be a successful floor vote. To which we would add that given the fact  that SB 366 author Senator Caballero is Chair of Senate Appropriations, it is highly unlikely that  Governor Newsom will veto it, notwithstanding the expense associated with it in a year in which the  state is trying to cope with a substantial deficit.  

The success of this bill represents a huge shift in the state’s approach to coping with the effects of  aridification – from an almost single-minded obsession with conservation as the primary tool to a  more diversified approach that combines conservation with the construction of a 21^st Century  appropriate equivalent of the 20^th Century’s State Water Project. While that offers relief to a sector  like golf that is sure to be among the first activities on the chopping block should circumstances  become as dire as they were just 23 short months ago before Mother Nature bailed us out with  record precipitation, do keep in mind that massive infrastructure projects are massively expensive,  and the costs therefore are sure to fall disproportionately upon those that are large consumers of  water. For both practical and political reasons, it behooves golf to keep developing and playing  conservation cards, albeit that too is a resource consumptive activity. When it comes to water in  Southern California all roads lead to increased costs of doing business – costs sure to always run  ahead of the CPI. 

AB 460 (Bauer-Kahan; D-San Ramon) 

A bill that was pulled and made a 2-year bill by its author late in 2023 due to the limited time  available at the end of the 2023 session to craft the amendments necessary to earn the votes  required for passage, AB 460 is another in a string of recent bills that presage a reworking of certain  established “water rights” increasingly seen as impediments to achieving long-term water 

sustainability and equity. In short, AB 460 gives the State Water Resources Control Board (SWRCB)  the enforcement tools (interim relief orders and hefty fines) capable of effectively policing the  ”illegal diversions” now capable of the documentation necessary to deem them “illegal” per a bill  authored by Senator Ben Allen (D-Redondo Beach) and signed by the Governor last year – another  of the bills presaging the reworking of certain established water rights.  

With an amendment extending the commencement date envisaged therein, AB 460 escaped  Suspense last week and moves to what is almost certain to be a positive floor vote. The  significance for the golf community: Expect more of this as time passes; as with last Century’s  water capture and conveyance infrastructure, what worked for the 19^th and 20^th Centuries is simply  not going to work for the 21^st.  

Imperial Irrigation District Gives Back 700 Million Acre-Feet of Water 

In an arrangement complicated by certain trade-offs with the San Diego County Water Authority  that in the opinion of multiple environmental organizations blunts its impact and doubles down on  the environmental catastrophe known as the Salton Sea, the largest user of Colorado River water,  the Imperial Irrigation District (IID), has agreed to voluntarily forgo 700 million acre-feet of its  allocation between now and 2026. That is when the seven states and the agencies operating within  those states are set to agree to a new long-term Compact in which all of them agree to cede some  of their extant allocation to accommodate the significantly lessened water production of the  Colorado Basin.  

While the number of golf courses in the Imperial Irrigation District are few and very far between, the  same cannot be said for the number of golf courses in the other areas of Southern California  dependent in some part upon Colorado River water for their needs.  

For the 19 million Southern California customers of the Metropolitan Water District (MWD),  including those in Ventura County and parts of Los Angeles County that don’t have access to  Colorado River supplies, the impact is obvious to the degree to which it presages what is likely going to come out of the 2026 negotiations going on right now. For the Coachella Valley Water  District (CVWD) that serves more than 100 golf courses, though those golf courses are not potable  customers, they are in part reliant upon raw water from the Colorado River to supplement pumping,  and the 35,000 acre-feet that the Coachella Valley is ceding back to the River at the moment is  water that the District had been annually contributing to its Levy Spreading Grounds, a forbearance  made possible in part by Mother Nature’s recent bounty and the fact that the aquifer beneath is  capable of stasis without that water between now and 2026. But as CVWD has reminded its active  Golf & Water Task Force, that forbearance is temporary, and the permanent cuts beyond 2026 may  well be higher once those negotiations are completed.  

For those in Northern and Central California that don’t depend upon imports from the Colorado  Basin or imports from the State Water Project (see DWR update below), the same effects of  aridification that are driving reductions in the flows upon which Southern Californians are dependent apply to Northern California supplies, whether in the form of Central Valley and Central  Coast groundwater, San Francisco’s draws from Hetch Hetchy, captured rainfall, or the snowmelt  that feeds the Sacramento Delta and so many of Northern California’s rivers every spring. 

One more thing for the golf community to consider. The cuts made in IID are made possible by  paying farmers handsomely to fallow fields that support crops amenable to fallowing, e.g., hay.  That is not an option for golf courses, which even if they were amenable to fallowing, no public largesse would ever be made available to something so purely discretionary and recreational as  golf.  

DWR’s State Water Project Delivery Capability Report 

Consistent with the Governor’s data in his Executive Order “Making Conservation a California Way  of Life,” the UCLA/UC Merced/UC Davis study cited by the sponsors of SB 366, and every other  credible academic and governmental analysis of the state’s water situation, the California  Department of Water Resources (DWR) most recent annual report on the capability of the State  Water Project’s ability to deliver water to the Southern part of the state has downgraded that  capability. DWR now reports that California can expect somewhere in the range of 13-23 percent  less water therefrom in the next 20 years. A 23 percent decline would be equivalent to about  496,000 acre-feet a year, enough to supply 1,736,000 homes for a year. 

Again, while the State Water Project feeds the Southern part of the state, the water it sends south comes from the Northern part of the state. Lowered water yields are lowered water yields no matter  where one sits in the state.  

Rare is the instance in which all the data point in the same direction. We may not like the direction,  but certain knowledge of direction does spare us from having to slog through conflicting evidence to figure the game and industry’s best course forward. 

A Few Thoughts in Closing 

First, anyone who thought that the pressure to investigate new cards to play in the game known as  water footprint reduction and then invest in them might lessen in the coming years, needs to think  again. Everything screams the opposite. Risk aversion in current circumstances poses the much  greater risk. 

Second, anyone who fails to understand that the need to modernize and upgrade what everyone  agrees is an outmoded water capture and conveyance infrastructure can only add to the real costs  of conducting golf operations in California fails to anticipate and prepare for the inevitable. And in  the process may just plain fail.  

Third, notwithstanding the first two “thoughts,” we should be encouraged by just how well the golf  community again fared in Sacramento. The bills CAG opposed either failed or were amended to  CAG’s satisfaction (e.g., AB 3192 & SB 1413). The bills CAG supported are either on their way to the  Governor’s desk (e.g., SB 366) or gained sufficient traction to merit a future credible run (e.g., AB  2947). The lone late session surprise was cured when the author of last year’s “junk fees” law  (Dodd; D-Napa) rushed through a gut-and-amend emergency bill to make clear that restaurants  were never meant to come under its provisions. The reception the allied golf community again  received from Members, Staffers, and agencies made clear that the game’s stock continues to rise  in Sacramento. And all told, this should give the golf community confidence that the advocacy  tools it has developed in recent years can be sharpened if necessary to continue coping with  whatever Mother Nature and human institutions throw its way.

June 10, 2024

Article Provided by SCGA

SB 478 (Dodd; D-Napa) sailed through the legislature last year with nary a mention from SCGA Public Affairs, because it was common knowledge, or at least the “commons” thought it was common knowledge, that no aspect of a golf operation, public or private, would be affected by its passage.

The “commons” got it wrong!

First, a little background; then why we’re reporting on this today.

While passed into law last year, SB 478 was slated to become effective July 1, 2024 to allow for all affected businesses to accommodate its requirements. As for those “requirements,” the bill prohibited hidden surcharges and what it referred to as “junk fees” from being tacked onto customers’ bills, requiring that they be included in the charges posted and advertised.

We didn’t track or otherwise report on the law, because the California Attorney General’s Office in 2023 opined that were the bill to become law, restaurants could continue to apply surcharges as long as they were disclosed on the menu, with the clear implication that clear and full disclosure on banquet contracts would also permit their use for this common form of golf club/course business practice.

However, last month the Attorney General reversed course and announced that SB 478 would also apply to restaurants and related food/beverage operations. With that announcement we received calls from public golf courses and private equity clubs as to what that would mean for them. With our standard disclaimer about never issuing anything resembling a formal legal opinion, we suggested that our reading would indicate applicability in both contexts, notwithstanding the fact that the business model of a private golf club food/beverage operation has little to nothing to do with “advertising” or “posting” fees to the public; to themselves as owners of the operation perhaps, but not to the public.

Senator Dodd is now proposing that the law carve “restaurants” out of the law. Specifically, Dodd is proposing that restaurants be permitted to continue adding surcharges and mandatory gratuities/fees to bills as long as those surcharges and mandatory fees are revealed upfront, clearly, and conspicuously.

It goes without saying that the California Restaurant Association (CRA) supports the carve out; indeed, smart money would be on that organization having gone into high gear upon the Attorney General’s reversal of course last month. Unite Here Local 11, the labor union that represents numerous restaurant workers also supports the carve out, as do some but certainly not all of the state’s many consumer watchdog groups. While we shy away from making predictions, we do believe that given the circumstances, Senator Dodd’s proposed carve out has a high likelihood of coming to fruition.

We know that many California golf operations are interested in how this plays out in the coming weeks, and we will do our best to keep you informed.

Tuesday, May 14, 2024

Article provided by SCGA Public Affairs

It isn’t often that one bill can highlight all that separates one side of California’s great water divide from the other – from those interests fixated on conservation as the focus of future supply and those intent on pursuing a more diversified portfolio – from those who are often accused of believing that California can conserve its way out of its aridification predicament and those who are convinced that if conservation is the only tool in the state’s water resiliency toolbox, California is doomed to be hollowed out in much the same way rust belt cities like Pittsburgh and Detroit were in the last quarter of the 20th Century. A divide who some have the luxury of navigating by posturing, some are forced to navigate by the practical demands of their livelihoods, and some try to navigate by a balancing act that though once common, seems to have all but disappeared from today’s body politic.

The bill?

SB 366 (Caballero; D-Merced / Bipartisan bill / Co-authors in Assembly Essalyi and Rubio) – California Water Plan: Long Term Supply Targets – A bill that would revise and recast certain provisions regarding The California Water Plan to, among other things, require the department to instead establish a stakeholder advisory committee and to expand the membership of the committee to include tribes, labor, and environmental justice interests. The bill would require the department to coordinate with the California Water Commission, the State Water Resources Control Board, other state, and federal agencies as appropriate, and the stakeholder advisory committee to develop a comprehensive plan for addressing the state’s water needs and meeting specified long-term water supply targets established by the bill for purposes of The California Water Plan. The bill goes beyond the current approach to water supply planning by establishing specific targets to be met by certain dates and requires a financing plan for achieving these targets.

Click here to read the 11-page bill as most recently amended in the Assembly April 8.

SB 366 cleared the Senate floor in 2023 by a unanimous 40 – 0 vote but was pulled and made a two-year bill by its author due to the Water, Parks, and Wildlife Committee Chair’s opposition to the setting of specific supply targets, a heartburn over targets very much shared by the Governor’s Office. Both were worried, and rightfully so, that a set of targets cum dates supported by a financing plan for the achievement thereof would commit the state to spending mandates it might find difficult if not impossible to fund, let alone complete.

We know what you’re thinking. The state has little problem fixing targets cum specific dates that vary from impossible to meet when they’re established to possible but onerously expensive to accommodate when the day of reckoning comes. Think SORE equipment, EV’s, industrial emissions of all types, fossil fuel phase-outs, electrification, etc. Of course, what those have in common is that the expenses incurred to meet them fall not on the state, but on the private sector, albeit various levels of government do offer rebates, credits, and other incentives to cushion the expense. For the golf community, think about the roughly doubled cost of that electric mower to replace the gas-powered one that is no longer available for sale in California as of January 1.

SB 366 would very much put the State of California on the hook for at least trying to develop a workable plan cum funding mechanism for meeting the targets established per the process outlined therein. Of course, when the stakes are high enough and the sector is big enough, target dates get extended. Think those nuclear power and natural gas plants that are scheduled to operate well past their decommission dates. Think those EV targets that are nowhere near coming to fruition by the dates established therein.

We know what you’re thinking. What about the golf courses, not to mention the “mom-and-pop” landscapers, which have to purchase much more expensive electric equivalents that often don’t work as efficiently as the gas-powered equipment they are replacing? Think, but do get over it. Feasibility and cost arguments that work when the stakes are high and the affected sector is enormous just don’t cut it when the sector is puny. Yes, we know that the California golf industry is a $15.1 billion enterprise, which is $4 billion higher than Florida and more than double that of Texas, according to the American Golf Industry Coalition (AGIC). However, that represents exactly 0.003% of California’s GDP. So, get with the program, buy the new equipment, figure out how to absorb the expense, and live to tackle issues that golf can and does tackle effectively – e.g., AB 5, AB 2257, AB 672, AB 1910, AB 1572, AB 3192, and the many common-sense conservation protocols and programs the game has developed in close collaboration with water wholesalers, retailers, utilities, and districts throughout the state.

The Assembly Committee on Water, Parks, and Wildlife has a new Chair in 2024, and SB 366 will be heard in that Committee sometime in June. On one side of the “divide” is the large and growing coalition of the state’s water providers/retailers/districts that understand better than most that they came perilously close to performing triage in 2022 and would have in some cases literally run out of water in 2023 had Mother Nature not intervened to bring them record precipitation in that year followed by a much better than average year in 2024.

The California Municipal Utilities Association (CMUA) is the lead agency of the “coalition.” To read their 2-page “fact sheet” click here. To read their 2-page “benefits sheet” click here. Between now and June CMUA is planning to seek the support of those California sectors (e.g., business, agriculture, recreation) whose interests are very much on the supply side of the “divide,” those that while they may very much consider conservation to be one of the components of an effective supply portfolio, don’t share with those of a more puritanical bent the notion that California can conserve its way out of what many have come to refer to as our current state of weather “whiplash” – long dry spells punctuated by wet years driven almost entirely by atmospheric rivers whose waters are not now capturable.

On the other side of the divide? That would be some of the powerful environmental organizations concerned that we have not yet done enough to add to supply through conservation and worried that much of the supply created by means other than conservation will come at the expense of the environmental integrity of the Sacramento Delta. To them we would add those elected leaders concerned that any set of targets set by the long-term demands of the world’s 5^th largest economy can only create funding demands that can be met by gutting current funding priorities. Depending on how one counts, California is facing a $43 or $73 billion deficit in 2024 that shows signs of only going up in the next couple of years – hardly a propitious moment for ambitious funding mandates.

Stuck squarely in the middle of the divide is the Governor. Chief executives don’t have the luxury of single-minded advocacy on the theory that someone or something else will balance their advocacy against the advocacy of those on the other side of various divides. They have to make things work, or if you prefer a phrase that was once considered beyond the realm of American respectability – making the trains run on time. Or as Gavin Newsom’s predecessor Jerry Brown defined the role – paddling down the middle of a great river, sometimes paddling left, sometimes right, in an effort to keep the ship of state from running aground.

On water matters Governor Newsom has been paddling “right” recently if one considers focusing on supply a rightward political drift. He is pressing for the construction of the Delta Tunnel and the completion of the Sites Reservoir. His State Water Resources Control Board (SWRCB) has reversed course in favor of urban water use and supply with respect to the Rule effectuating his “Making Conservation a California Way of Life” executive order to the delight of the Association of California Water Agencies (ACWA) and the chagrin of most of the state’s normative environmental organizations.

Support of SB 366 in its current form would amount to not just another “rightward” shift, but one of considerably more consequence than the three cited here. And it would be a shift requiring the assumption of massive funding commitments. But there are reasons why every governor since the 1970’s, both Democrats and Republicans, have pressed for some form of Delta conveyance, whether one tunnel or two, and every governor has tried to rise above the parochial concerns of those on both sides of the “divide” through various balancing schemes that often seem like walks on a circus tightrope. And so, while we would be foolish to suggest that we have a clue as to how this will play out when SB 366 is joined in the Assembly next month, we would suggest that while the Governor cannot just say no to the coalition of water agencies bent on pressing the supply issue with specific targets cum funding mandates, he is not likely to say yes to everything contained in the bill, but rather use the power given him by the California Constitution to soften it into something that makes a powerful statement about the compelling need to develop a more robust supply strategy while deferring the attachment of specific targets to a dilatory process described but not necessarily prescribed in the language.

As for which side of this “divide” the interests of the California golf community fall, the audience that consumes these “Updates” doesn’t need our counsel to figure that out. As for whether the California Alliance for Golf (CAG) and the constituencies that comprise it will make clear that preference in the form of a formal public position, that is the subject of an internal debate already underway.

How all this plays out will tell us much about how many things in California will play out. We’ll do our best to keep you informed. Stay tuned.

Wednesday, April 17, 2024

Article provided by SCGA

When introduced by Assembly Member Al Muratsuchi (D-Torrance) February 16, AB 3192 contained a provision that would have banned the use of all nonorganic pesticides and fertilizers on golf resorts in California’s Coastal Zone. The bill defined “golf resorts” as golf courses attached by ownership/management to resorts with at least 300 rooms. At minimum, Pebble Beach, Half Moon Bay, Terrenea, Pelican Hill, Aviara, Monarch Beach, and La Costa would have come under the prohibition. Torrey Pines could have come under it as well, since the two adjoining on-site hotels may have sufficient direct business connection to trigger the necessary nexus.

The California Alliance for Golf (CAG) did not follow suit with the hospitality sector and California Chamber of Commerce in opposing the entirety of the bill, much of which deals with labor and other issues not of direct concern to a golf centric advocacy alliance, but did file an “oppose unless amended” letter with the Assembly Natural Resources Committee – unless amended to remove the blanket ban on the use of all nonorganic pesticides and fertilizers in favor of language consistent with these facilities’ ability to continue offering high quality golf experiences, including Pebble Beach’s ability to host five US Opens in the next 16 years and the AT & T PGA Tour stop on an annual basis.

The bill fell one vote short of the number required to pass out the Natural Resources Committee when it was heard April 8; however, the author was granted reconsideration, giving him the ability to bring it back before the Committee in the time frame necessary to move out of that Committee and on to its second committee of reference (Assembly Judiciary) before the Assembly’s April 26 deadline for bills to pass out of their committee and on to Appropriations.

In that interim Mr. Muratsuchi amended the provision that animated the golf community’s opposition as follows:

30750.3. The use of any nonorganic pesticide or fertilizing material at, or on any part of, any major coastal resort is authorized on areas of a course only when applied in a manner consistent with established integrated pest management principles and where no alternative fit for intended use and proven effectiveness is available. Where nonorganic pesticide or fertilizing material is used, the major coastal resort shall use the least toxic alternative possible in the smallest quantity possible.

As confirmed by the Directors of Agronomy and Superintendents at a number of affected “golf resorts,” this language met the standard the Alliance sought in terms of allowing the affected facilities to continue to offer high quality golf experiences, while at the same time substituting organic equivalents where applicable, minimizing the use of non-organics, and following “well established IPM (integrated pest management) principles.” Those USGA Championships and annual PGA Tour stops would be safe.

Other amendments now part of AB 3192 include a redefinition of what constitutes a “golf resort” that reduces the number of such “resorts” affected, including Pebble Beach, and a clarification of the protocols for selecting the “independent qualified consultants” that are to perform the periodic audits that remain central to the bill’s prescriptions.

With that, the California Alliance for Golf (CAG) and Golf Course Superintendents Association of America (GCSAA), which had filed a separate “oppose unless amended” letter, withdrew their opposition. Whether that proves enough to secure one of the three (3) previous “no vote” Democratic Members when the bill goes up for reconsideration is anybody’s guess. The bill has plenty of opponents, but if and when it is reconsidered, it will be reconsidered without the provision that would have caused great harm to some of the state’s venerable golf properties. Just as importantly, should the bill fail in 2024 but come back in a future session, something that is quite routine in Sacramento, it is highly likely to come back sans this objectionable provision.

If one of your conclusions from all this is that the statewide golf community’s stock is on a consistent upward trajectory in Sacramento, you’re on the right track. Whether AB 5, AB 2257, AB 1572, AB 672, AB 1910, and now AB 3192, golf has been faring rather well in recent years. Some might suggest that we have found our way to a formula that can be scaled up to a much more robust advocacy presence in the future. Include us as part of the “some.”

Wednesday, April 10, 2024

Article provided by the SCGA

A cautionary tale from semi-rural Santa Barbara County to remind you that the pressure to repurpose golf courses is not just a phenomenon in California’s densely packed urban cores.

Glen Annie Golf Club in an area of unincorporated Santa Barbara County close to UC Santa Barbara has long been zoned “agricultural,” along with the rest of the open space and avocado orchards surrounding it. Given that efforts to construct housing to meet the needs of an exploding student population at nearby UC Santa Barbara have long been met with failure in the planning processes of Santa Barbara County, the owners of Glen Annie understood that unless they preferred harvesting avocados to greens fees, any effort to develop their land for residential or commercial purposes was an exercise in futility.

Not anymore. Faced with the threat of the “builders remedies” that would follow from failing to offer up substantial tracts of land for housing development, the Santa Barbara County Planning Commission April 1 took a long-anticipated action to rezone substantial tracts of agricultural properties as residential in order to keep the State of California at bay. Glen Annie will soon be free to sell the property per a residential valuation that is multiples of a golf course.

The same process of market capitalism that destroyed the daily fee market in the City of Los Angeles is now in the process of operating in rural Santa Barbara County, and by implication is likely to be duplicated in other rural communities that have failed to meet the state’s onerous new housing element requirements.

Excerpted from the item approving the rezoning of the land beneath Glen Annie and roughly 17 other large tracts of unincorporated Santa Barbara County land:

“The HEU rezone amendments would primarily create the potential for new housing on infill sites in the existing Urban Area. However, the amendments would facilitate some new housing development on sites currently located within the Rural Area. For example, the Glen Annie site is located in the Rural Area and would transform a golf course surrounded by natural areas and agricultural uses into an urban residential neighborhood with up to 40 units per acre in some areas on the site. Rezoning of this site and others in the Rural Area require an expansion of the Urban Area boundary. As such, the proposed Land Use Element and Coastal Land Use Plan amendments (Attachment C, Exhibits 1 and 4 to the staff report, respectively) include amendments to the South Coast Rural Region Land Use Designation Maps and Goleta Land Use Designation Map to expand existing or create new Urban Areas to encompass these rezone sites. As mentioned above, the County identified all available urban infill rezone sites that had a reasonable likelihood of developing within the eight-year planning period. However, these sites were not enough to satisfy the County’s RHNA plus the 15 percent buffer for the lower- and moderate-income levels. As a result, the County was obligated under State housing element law to identify other available sites outside the Urban Area, such as Glen Annie. Though these sites are located in the Rural Area, they would create logical extensions of existing urban areas and neighborhoods as they are adjoined by existing residential uses and city boundaries.””

It should not be lost on anyone that Glenn Annie GC is in the same unincorporated area of Santa Barbara County as another golf course that closed not too long ago – Ocean Meadows, a 9-hole regulation golf course adjacent to the Isla Vista community that sits between where Ocean Meadows once was and the UC Santa Barbara campus. Built in the 1960’s as a 9-hole golf course, Ocean Meadows’ business plan was from that inception to add another 9 holes as the population of the region grew. As later Sandpiper in the 1970’s and Glen Annie in the 1990’s opened for business in the same area, that never happened. But what did happen was a public call aided by environmentalists, land conservancies, and UC Santa Barbara, which was among the first American universities to offer an Environmental Science Major, to add the land occupied by Ocean Meadows back to the contiguous wetlands to which it was originally a part – a “call” funded by state/federal grants, the land conservancy attached to the contiguous wetlands, and UC Santa Barbara.

Two publicly accessible golf courses (and practice facilities) one lost and one likely to be lost to higher and better economic suitors – in one case (Glen Annie) private sector higher and better suitors and in the other (Ocean Meadows) public sector higher and better suitors – a dual squeeze that works consistently over time to reduce California’s stock of golf courses. Again, NOT all in the state’s densely packed urban communities.

# # # # # # # # # # #

We trust you find as we do that all three of the latest “news” issues covered here today are in truth all the same issue – the game’s use of the land it requires to offer its great pleasures and benefits to 3.1 million Californians. And yet, one rarely if ever encounters an industry conference, show, or symposium where land use is discussed qua land use and not in some tangential way that avoids the issue. The game can and must do better.

Wednesday, April 10, 2024

Article provided by the SCGA

The National Golf Course Owners Association’s (NGCOA) Harvey Silverman may have characterized the City of Los Angeles’ uncommonly quick reaction to intense media scrutiny (five separate Los Angeles Times stories including a Sunday lead editorial) of the depredations of tee time brokering with his quip in the organization’s “Golf Business Weekly” about the city having reacted “faster than fixing potholes.” Much faster we would add. And with a pilot program that the city offered as but the first of more steps to come to restore public confidence in the fairness of its Internet reservation system. As for the steps:

• A non-refundable $10 deposit per golfer to be collected at the time of booking. If the golfer cancels the tee time, the deposit is forfeited. If the golfer plays, the $10 deposit is be applied to the green fee at check-in. Think of it in one of two ways: 1) A fee for the privilege of holding a high demand tee time, or 2) earnest money to ensure that the booker is acting in good faith with every intention to fulfill the transaction. In other words, not the other and perhaps more common method of ensuring good faith and validating credit cards known as the “advance reservation fee,” which the city accurately deemed a de facto greens fee increase in rejecting it in favor of this non-refundable deposit tool.
• A “Code of Conduct” for use of the system that explicitly states that violations of the Golf Rules may result in fines and/or prosecution in accordance with existing municipal codes that allow for fines up to $1,000 or 6 months of jail time and beefs up existing definitions of “brokering” to now include the transfer of tee times through any web-based site, web-based application, other applications, publication, or mobile device for a fee.

The ”pilot” was adopted by the city’s Board of Recreation & Park Commissioners last Thursday and will become fully effective within days. Yes, indeed; faster than those potholes get fixed! Los Angeles managed to get this together for a quick emergency meeting of its Golf Advisory Committee the Monday prior, where impressively 15 of its 18 members managed to make the meeting on 72 hours notice, and then on to the Mayoral Park Board three days hence.

It’s important to note that the city made clear that it intends to work with its vendor to add features such as random release of cancelled times to further obviate the business models of the brokers taking financial advantage of a system operated not on market principles, but rather on the same basic set of principles that the City of Los Angeles operates all its park/recreation amenities – provision of public services that would otherwise be onerously expensive and thus out of financial reach for the vast majority of the population but for their provision by government. Yes, golf generates net revenues for the city, and golfers should take pride in that. But in a market that the NGF describes as representing the worst supply to demand ratio in the nation – the most golfers chasing the fewest golf holes – those net revenues could be considerably higher were the city to operate them for maximal financial benefit. Los Angeles, once dotted with daily fee facilities, is now, with one anomalous exception, home to only private clubs and municipal golf courses. There is no “in-between” anymore. Such is the creative destructive power of market capitalism.

Wednesday, April 10, 2024

Article provided by the SCGA

AB 3192 – Rest in Peace Maybe

Every year there seems to be one bill filed in one house of the California Legislature that keeps the California golf community up at night. This year’s version is AB 3192 (Muratsuchi; D-Torrance). Among many other things AB 3192 places a 100% ban on the use of all non-organic pesticides and fertilizers on “golf resorts” in the California Coastal Zone. We believe the way the bill defines “golf resort” ensnares PGA Tour and major professional and college championship sites such as Pebble Beach, Torrey Pines, and Omni La Costa in its proscriptions. It ensnares some prominent golf facilities in Orange and San Mateo Counties as well.

We can sleep again, maybe.

AB 3192 appeared to have failed to make it past its first committee of reference yesterday when it fell one vote short of the six votes necessary to move out of the 11-member Natural Resources Committee and on to its second committee of reference, the Assembly Judiciary Committee. Because the three Republican members of the Committee were declared “no” votes in advance of the meeting, six of the eight Democratic members needed to vote “aye” for the bill to move. However, three of them stayed off the bill – Buffy Wicks (D-Oakland), Jim Wood (D-Healdsburg), and Gail Pellerin (D-Santa Cruz). Significantly, Buffy Wicks is Chair of the powerful Appropriations Committee and Jim Wood is Speaker Pro Tempore.

We say, “appeared to have failed,” because it now appears that sometime well after the members departed the committee room, bill author Muratsuchi was granted reconsideration and is likely trying to convince one of his colleagues who stayed off the bill to switch his or her vote to aye and move the bill forward to Judiciary.

The allied California golf community in the form of the California Alliance for Golf (CAG) worked with myriad other interests to inform legislators of the unnecessary and unintended consequences of a total ban on all non-organic inputs at these golf facilities, one of which is set to host five (5) United States Open Championships (three men & two women) in the next 16 years. We were in the process of moving forward an amendment that would have allowed for measured and regulated use of certain non-organic fertilizers and pesticides when the bill apparently failed to move. Should it indeed move on reconsideration, we remain optimistic that some form of this amendment, which had already gained considerable traction, can move forward with it. In any case, what happened at yesterday’s Natural Resources Committee hearing doesn’t bode well for the ultimate success of the bill.

Other than a pair of Assembly-Senate bills that propose making California a year-round Standard Time state, the rest of the game’s Sacramento agenda is all about support of certain bills – in particular one (AB 2947) that would encourage the California Department of Water Resources (DWR) to provide funding for turf conversion in addition to turf removal and another (AB 2285) that would focus more funding on parks, green spaces, and recreational amenities in the state’s dense urban areas. AB 2947 dovetails with golf’s ongoing conversations with multiple water wholesalers and retailers in Southern California – conversations that for the most part have been well received and productive. AB 2285 dovetails with the game’s increasing passion for providing overt support for those municipal and developmental golf courses that are in the state’s “underserved” communities and are the literal staging grounds for almost all of the game’s growth, sustenance, and diversification programs.

Monday, March 25, 2024

Article provided by the SCGA

One of the standards in the American songbook is a song written not by an American but by a Mexican. Its English title – “What a Difference a Day Makes.” It’s an old song made famous in 1959 (in America, that is) by Dinah Washington and recorded by scores of others since.

With respect to the issue of tee time brokers in the greater Los Angeles area (they exist in the Southland’s other counties too), what a difference a week makes. It’s hard to remember an issue in the golf world that has received so much media coverage – multiple newspaper stories, television clips, radio shows, social media, podcasts, magazine articles, topped off yesterday by a lead editorial in the most widely circulated issue (Sunday) of the state’s largest newspaper (Los Angeles Times). For those able to access the newspaper’s subscription, click here to read yesterday’s lead Editorial, “L.A. should stop allowing people to hog golf tee times.”

Here’s the difference this last week made, and it’s a difference not just in terms of the alacrity with which we can expect the major municipal golf systems to begin implementing mitigations, but also in terms of what the week means in terms of disabusing all notions of golf somehow being underutilized and golfers not as passionate about the object of their affection as others are about theirs.

Remember, the predicate for virtually every proposal to repurpose a municipal golf course for another use, whether that proposal is for affordable housing (AB 1910), open space (Sepulveda Basin & Tahquitz Creek), other recreational uses (Mission Bay & Bell Gardens), or general commercial uses, is that there is too much golf. After this last week, that’s a hard predicate to sell. The premise underlying that predicate is that golfers are apathetic in comparison to others, not just enthusiasts of other sports/recreation activities, but enthusiasts of wetland restoration, open space acquisition, and various other forms of environmental preservation. Judging not just by the media attention, but also the massive number of rank-and-file golfers that responded to social media calls to action, that too is a hard premise to sell to elected officials, media, and government agencies.

We would be remiss if we didn’t share how proud we were of the substantial number of golfers who showed up and testified before the Los Angeles City Golf Advisory Committee last Monday. They were frustrated but not angry. They were on point. They came armed with solutions. Unlike the coverage of one large local media organ in particular, they steered completely clear of making this an issue involving only the Korean American community; they made it an issue of equitable access to a system that they acknowledged would continue to be difficult to access even if made 100% equitable to all comers.

We would also be remiss if we didn’t share certain clear parallels between the way this issue is playing out and the way the whole AB 1910 issue played out in favor of the statewide golf community. In both cases it was the participation of large numbers of rank-and-file golfers that spelled the difference. Yes, with respect to AB 1910, the game’s leadership organizations, particularly SCGA, did much to lay the groundwork and work the strategies and angles that only organizations with broad reach and access to intelligence can. Yes, with respect to tee time brokers, if truth be known, the same leadership organizations have been following that same playbook. But without the engagement of large numbers of rank-and-file golfers in the mix, we cannot say with full confidence that AB 1910 would have been so thoroughly rejected, nor can we say with full confidence what we’ll boldly issue now. We are on the cusp of the kinds of changes capable of restoring some measure of the equity that all properly demand of these Internet reservation systems and in the process steer dollars away from 3^rd party profiteers and to the owners and managers of these systems and the golf courses they own/manage.

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In addition to the action we anticipate in the next 30-40 days with respect to the whole tee time brokering issue, we anticipate much action in the next 30-40 days with respect to the legislation we are tracking, opposing, opposing unless amended, and supporting in this session. We will report on both and whatever else pops up on our radar screens as things unfold.

Monday, March 18, 2024

Article provided by the SCGA

The more things change, the more they stay the same, albeit as the technology improves the same things come in different packages.

With respect to the furor over tee time brokers making it nearly impossible for Los Angeles Basin’s public golfers to secure tee times at almost any time of the day or week, let’s just say that we’ve seen this picture before.

Before golf’s most recent spike in popularity (2020 – present), golf had peaked nationally in 1999 and then declined incrementally but steadily thereafter through 2016 before turning slightly up just before COVID. In Southern California the game peaked in 1991-1992 and declined slightly the rest of the 1990’s before entering the same decline cum flattening in this century, followed in turn by the same incredible burst of growth 2020 through today.

With the stage thus set, we direct you to a May 1991 Los Angeles Times article entitled, “Golf: Tee Times are Tough on L.A. City Courses.” After pointing out that weekday greens fee in Los Angeles in 1970 were $3.50 and the same fee in 1991 had risen to $10.50, the story noted that “increased fees hadn’t muffled the golf explosion . . . The real problem is just reserving a starting tee time at one of the city’s seven 18-hole courses, or even at one of the six nine-hole courses. As for reserving a weekend time, the chances are slim to none.” The same Marty Tregnan whose name adorns the city’s junior golf academy in Griffith Park is quoted as saying, “the solution is obviously more courses.”

Of course, 33 years later Los Angeles has fewer public golf courses, not more. As a result, despite fees roughly 60% higher in real dollars than they were in 1991 ($10.50 in 1991 would be $23.92 in 2024 inflation adjusted dollars), it is even harder to get that tee time – not just in the City of Los Angeles, but Los Angeles County, Long Beach, and Pasadena as well, although due to significant resident preferences and a higher fee structure for non-residents, it is less difficult in Long Beach than the rest. A testament not just to increased demand, but also the fact that these municipal golf courses are just that much better operated and maintained today than they were in 1991, making them more suitable alternatives to private clubs, whose fees and dues have also risen commensurately.

Does this make it any less outrageous that there are tee time brokers who deny equal access to these systems, no matter how slender that access may be? Does it make it any less damaging to have liquidity that could be going to the owners and operators of these facilities and these facilities’ capital reserve funds going to 3^rd parties?

Absolutely not! But it does mean it is imperative that before we all get our populist knickers in a twist, we get a firmer grip on the root of the tee broker problem – a problem that like all difficult problems is in part a function of attributes of local municipal golf systems that most reading these words would consider virtues to be cherished and maintained, not jettisoned cavalierly.

The root of the “problem” is twofold:

1. The National Golf Foundation (NGF) identifies Los Angeles as the most golf starved golf market in the United States – the most golfers chasing the fewest golf holes, and by a very wide margin over the next worst supply to demand ratio in the nation. There are fewer public golf courses today than there were 50 years ago, when the population of the region was much smaller and the percentage of the population that played golf was a smaller percentage thereof. Once dotted with “daily fee” golf courses (privately owned but open for business to the public facilities), Los Angeles is now home only to very pricey private country clubs and municipal golf courses (publicly owned parkland facilities), with one exception – a golf course in the rural northeast corner of the city (Tujunga Wash) that sits literally in a riverbed (Angeles National GC).
2. The city and county of Los Angeles as well as Long Beach and a few of the region’s smaller municipal systems (e.g., Pasadena, Burbank, and Downey) don’t set their public parkland golf course greens fees per a market mechanism that would literally turn these publicly owned parks into playgrounds for the privileged, but rather set fees that recover costs, create the capital reserve funds necessary to allow for infrastructure replacement through user fees as opposed to tax dollars and bonded indebtedness, and in the cases of the big three in Los Angeles County (LA City, LA County, Long Beach) and Pasadena, provide revenues over and above all that for use by park departments (LA City and County), general funds (Long Beach), and an old college football stadium (Pasadena – Rose Bowl).

Where there is money to be made, persons seem to find a way, and when the “way” is technologically based as in Internet Reservation Systems, those finding that way have both the incentive and the capacity to stay a step ahead of governments, which are notoriously slow in figuring out modern technological platforms. How many billions did California’s EDD “lose” to fraud and theft during COVID? And often the fixes are as expensive as they are transitory, rendering them bad cost versus benefit propositions. That as much as anything explains the slow response to what influencers and others accurately portray as a genuine problem.

These governments and many of these governments’ private sector operators understand the depth of the problem. It’s a problem exacerbated by the reality that none of the standard Internet Reservation Systems commercially available in the United States are built to manage the security that the Los Angeles market practically alone among America’s golf markets would require to stay one step ahead of the re-sellers. And just as in 1991, the problem is one of re-sellers, not bots. Re-selling may violate the policies of these municipal systems, and there are remedies to address policy violations. However, re-selling does not violate any laws.

This doesn’t mean that the handful of Internet Reservation/POS providers that remain after a period of rapid consolidation won’t be able (for a price) to craft technological mitigations unique to the LA market. Our guess is that this is going on right now. But it won’t happen overnight, and costs will have to be borne by someone, and that “someone” is likely to be golfers.

The problem has garnered universal attention. The municipalities and their operators very much want to offer equal access for the limited stock of tee times they offer, and they want to offer them for access fees that keep these facilities in the affordable range for the average working men and women for which they were built in the first place and maintained for decades. They want to maintain as well the very generous junior, school, and senior citizen rates that have come to characterize virtually all of the region’s municipal programs.

Easier said than done, given the fact that more golf is being played today in the United States than at any time in the past. It may well be that some of that price consciousness will need to be sacrificed, not to better manage the facilities themselves, but to pay for the technology necessary to mitigate much of the damage now being done to the integrity of these systems by the brokers. Those solutions do exist, and we expect them to be implemented sooner than later. If there has been resistance to doing this, it has not been due to the indifference suggested by some; it has been due to these municipalities’ strong belief in the affordable/accessible mission at the heart of their municipal golf programs. A slowness to respond that is a function of mission, not callousness.

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There are three (3) glaring takeaways here – so glaring to an audience of golfers that we easily forget that they are not so glaring to non-golfers, among them significantly, office holders and media.

1. Every word above describes why it was so important to take dead aim at AB 672 and AB 1910 and not be shy about killing them as swiftly and comprehensively as possible – and why the California golf community must remain hyper-vigilant to their reemergence in any form.
2. Every word above describes why the campaigns to “save” municipal golf courses (e.g., Mission Bay, Bell Gardens, the Links @ Victoria, Sepulveda Basin) are central to the game’s hopes to thrive, let alone grow.
3. Every word above describes why a game whose public policy issues were on the front pages of the main sections Los Angeles Times and San Diego Union Tribune and the “California Section” of the Los Angeles Times this weekend, cannot continue to pinch its pennies in its spend on all forms of advocacy – local, regional, and state.

Wednesday, March 13, 2024

Article provided by the SCGA

Our 1^st Public Affairs Update of 2024 reported that the State Legislative Analyst’s (LAO) official take on the State Water Resources Control Board’s (SWRCB) Proposed Rule to effectuate the Governor’s “Making Conservation a California Way of Life” Executive Order was aligned with the criticisms issued by the state’s water agencies/providers. Specifically, the LAO criticized the SWRCB’s Proposed regulations as having created implementation challenges that go well beyond what legislation requires or the State’s Department of Water Resources recommends, creating difficulties for water suppliers by adding needless complexity and overly stringent performance measures, adding onerous costs that are likely to outweigh potential benefits, adding to the burdens of already overburdened lower income customers, establishing overly aggressive timelines, and placing too much emphasis upon commercial outdoor use that represents only 3% of California’s water use. The LAO then issued a series of recommendations for legislative consideration.

Yesterday, the SWRCB accepted most if not all of those recommendations in a revised Proposed Rule – to refresh your memories a Rule to establish, for the first time, budget-based water conservation targets for the over 400 large water suppliers that supply most Californians with water. Per the press release put out by the Agency, the revised Proposed Rule, whose comment period runs through March 26, is different from the one so roundly criticized last autumn by the state’s water agencies, the LAO, and the DWR in that it extends “timelines for water suppliers to meet efficiency goals, broadening their access to alternative compliance pathways and increasing the overall flexibility for how the proposed regulation can be implemented.” Under the proposed regulation, water suppliers would develop their own budgets for six different urban water needs and then use them to calculate a total water use objective. The six budget categories are: Residential indoor water use, residential outdoor water use, water loss (or the amount lost to leakage), and the irrigation of commercial, industrial, and institutional landscapes. The regulation requires suppliers to meet their overall objective only, not the budget set for each of the components.

As SWRCB Executive Director Eric Oppenheimer put it in his agency’s release: “The Legislature recognized that conservation is not one-size-fits-all, so the proposed regulation provides water suppliers with the tools and flexibility to adjust their conservation actions to local conditions and unique circumstances. . . and for some suppliers that still find meeting their objectives challenging, the draft regulation offers alternative, easier ways to do so.”

The revised draft increases the number of suppliers that would qualify for alternative compliance pathways. It also extends the effective date for meeting objectives based on the most efficient outdoor standards by five years. In addition, the draft delays the board’s assessment of suppliers’ compliance with the regulation until 2027.

To give you an idea of just how different the new Proposed Rule is from the one that incurred so much criticism late last year, here is part of the statement that the Association of California Water Agencies (ACWA) released in response to yesterday’s action:

“ACWA appreciates the work of the State Water Board over the past several months to understand the concerns of the water community. While ACWA staff continues to review the details of the revised draft regulation, it appears to address our primary concerns and is moving in the right direction toward a regulation that is feasible, cost-effective and avoids unintended impacts, while establishing an ambitious framework for advancing long-term water use efficiency in California.

The revised draft regulation now provides the appropriate flexibility in how urban water suppliers across the state can continue working with their customers to build on existing efforts to further advance long-term water use efficiency.”

The reviews from some of the state’s significant environmental organizations were not so sanguine. The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), Heal the Bay, Pacific Institute, and California Coastkeeper Alliance among others issued criticisms of SWRCB’s reversal of course.

Readers of these “Updates” don’t need us to connect the dots for them. The more dilatory approach adopted by the SWRCB, particularly its recognition of just how little can be gained by overly focusing on 3% of the state’s water use, comes as welcome relief to a sector that is a small part of that 3%.

Click here to read the Water Board’s updated fact sheet as it has now been amended to reflect changes in the way the Proposed New Rule affects compliance.

Monday, March 11, 2024

Article provided by the SCGA

Today we update you on two (2) topics of ongoing interest: 1) 2024 legislation, and 2) the two snowpacks (Sierra Nevada & Colorado Rockies) that determine Southern California’s import allocations.

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First up, where things stand just before the legislative policy committees take up the bills that were either filed by the February 16 deadline for 2024 filings or made it through the January 31 deadline for bills filed in the first year of the 2023-24 two-year session.

AB 3192 [“Major Coastal Resorts Environmental Accountability Act”] would among other things prohibit the use of “any nonorganic pesticide or fertilizing material at a “major coastal resort” that per the Act is defined as a resort or hotel that “Includes or operates a golf course on the premises.”The California Alliance for Golf (CAG) has decided to join the Golf Course Superintendents Association of America (GCSAA) in opposing the bill unless amended to remove the prohibition on all non-organics; there are other provisions in the bill that are beyond the scope of the golf community’s specific interest.The bill may be heard in the Assembly Natural Resources Committee March 19 but not yet docketed.

AB 2285 [“Environmental protection: 30×30 goal: urban nature-based investments: parity”] would among other things make the following declarations that presage future actions: 1) It is the intent of the Legislature to codify the priorities identified in the November 2023 report of the Outdoors for All initiative, “Providing Equitable Access to Parks and Nature,” and to encourage the Governor’s administration and the Legislature, when distributing resources towards conservation and restoration goals during future budgetary deliberations, to ensure parity in allocations toward urban nature-based investments; 2) It is the intent of the Legislature to require state funding entities, including, but not limited to, state conservancies and the Wildlife Conservation Board, when programming and awarding funds to revise, modify, or amend guidelines as necessary to meet the 30×30 goal, to allow for urban nature-based projects on degraded lands to be eligible and competitive for state funds.Because AB 2285 specifically references the massive “Parks Needs Assessment” study the County of Los Angeles completed in 2022 as having “piggybacked off the Governor’s and First Partner’s work on the 30×30 goal and “Outdoors for All” and prepared the 2022 Parks Needs Assessment Plus (PNA+) that identifies areas for Los Angeles-based environmental conservation and restoration that form the basis of the 30×30 goal, SCGA has determined to join other of Los Angeles County’s “active” recreational stakeholders in strongly supporting the bill and working with them and LA County to secure funding therefore, funding that very much could include golf projects such as the Maggie Hathaway $15 million “Legacy Project” in South Los Angeles as well as similarly situated ones in the county’s other “underserved” areas now served by SCGA Junior Golf Foundation programming at golf properties in those areas.The California Alliance for Golf (CAG) has yet to determine whether the bill is sufficiently impactful beyond Los Angeles County to merit the same full-throated support, although it is leaning in the direction of some measure of support.The bill is scheduled to be heard in the Assembly Natural Resources Committee March 19 along with another bill (AB 2240 – Reyes; D-San Bernardino) that also purports to effectuate the Governor’s Outdoors for All Initiative, albeit in a form much weaker in terms of providing funding for underserved communities in urban areas.

AB 1776 [Year-Round Standard Time] would repeal daylight saving time in the state and the provisions regarding the Legislature’s authority to amend the above-described provisions by a 2/3 vote. It would instead require the state and all political subdivisions of the state to observe year-round standard time and would exempt the state and all political subdivisions of the state from the provisions of federal law that establish the advancement of time. [Note: While a separate enabling act of Congress is required to go to year-round Daylight Savings Time, a state may go to year-round Standard Time without it.]The bill has been double referred to the Assembly Energies & Utilities and Governmental Organizations Committees but not yet set for hearing.There is widespread consensus that year-round Standard Time would harm the California golf community to the degree to which municipal and daily fee golf courses would lose twilight golf revenues with spring/summer sunsets one hour earlier than they are today with at best a negligible increase realized from sunrises that would be one hour earlier.The California Alliance for Golf (CAG) has yet to determine what course if any it will take, but smart money would be on filing a letter of opposition that points out this harm.

SB 1413 is a Senate version of AB 1776 [Year-Round Standard Time]. Both in the Assembly and Senate these companion bills are before Committees chaired by Members that have demonstrated strong support for the golf community.

AB-817 [Open meetings: teleconferencing: subsidiary body], a 2023 filing that made its way through January’s 2-year bill process, is a bill that would allow some measure of virtual participation for members of purely advisory bodies that because their advice has some measure of connection to a “legislative body” as defined in the state’s Open Public Meetings Law (Brown Act), come thereunder. Its passage would enable “subsidiary bodies” such as the region’s many golf advisory commissions/committees to allow for virtual participation so long as a quorum of the body is established in-person, and this could allow for more robust participation by the citizen advisors who populate them. Or as some have suggested, less effective overall participation to the degree to which personal critical mass is lost. The golf community is tracking this bill for the moment, undecided whether it merits overt support.

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Now up, how are things shaping up water-wise as we get close to the April 1 date that informs Southern California what it can expect in terms of import allocations – more specifically and accurately, what it portends in terms of the State Water Project’s allocations and the Colorado Basin’s reductions? The days of 100% Colorado Basin allocations are over, replaced by a set of pre-2026 givebacks that presage more permanently reduced allocations as the seven (7) states in the Colorado Compact continue to negotiate reduced allocations 2027 and beyond.

The Sierra snowpack was at 96% of the April 1 average as of March 7. Worst case scenario is that the rest of March will be precipitation free, and California will have enjoyed an average year after having enjoyed a 2023 that saw enough rain and snow to bring the state’s network of 154 reservoirs to 77% capacity as of March 4, which is 8% above the average of the last 30 years for that date, presaging more atop that as this year’s snow melts into the State Water Project. What next year and the years immediately beyond will bring is anybody’s guess, but the climatologists guess is that California’s Sierra Nevada has entered a period of “whiplash” – long periods of hot/dry conditions punctuated by short bursts of intense precipitation that the state’s infrastructure was not built to capture and store for use in the hot/dry years.

As the readers of these “Updates” know all too well, the Colorado Basin is another matter. Yes, this has been a bountiful precipitation season for the Colorado Basin as well, albeit not as bountiful as California. While this has helped stave off what looked not too long ago as Lakes Mead and Powell dropping below the levels required to generate electricity, it has not obviated the need for the three (3) Lower Basin states (Arizona, California, and Nevada) to voluntarily cede allocations before more permanent reductions are negotiated among all seven (7) states of the Compact 2026 and beyond – givebacks that are much more digestible now that Lake Mead is at 34% capacity, Lake Powell is at 37% capacity, and the region’s reservoirs are full. [The groundwater basins, not so much, but the readers of these “Updates” understand that as well. It takes considerably more rain and snow to replenish depleted aquifers than it does to fill above ground reservoirs, but that’s a subject for another day.]

The commitments Arizona, California, and Nevada made last year to reduce 3 million-acre-feet between then and 2026 pencil out to a 14% reduction that when added to the region’s conservation efforts promises to add thereto when the results are finally tallied. The three states drew less water off the river last year than in any year since 1983, and California’s draw was its lowest since 1949, a testament to the effectiveness of Southern California’s conservation and import substitution efforts. This will be enough to get the region through 2026, but the following statement issued last week by Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Camille Touton, the federal government’s point person for all things Colorado Basin, should tell us all we need to know about the long-term sufficiency of those givebacks. As reproduced in the Los Angeles Times:

“The prolonged drought crisis is driven by effects of climate change, including extreme heat and low precipitation. The reality is that aridification will only intensify the drought-related impacts in the Colorado River Basin and the communities it supports. We know we must adapt to this new reality with innovative and durable solutions.” [Los Angeles Times – “Reprieve for the Colorado River” – March 9, 2024]

Added to the “whiplash” phenomenon that characterizes the region’s other major imported source, Touton’s comments should tell the Southern California golf community all it needs to know about the imperative to continue making the investments, undertaking the innovations, and developing and using the technologies that are the sine qua non of continued water footprint reduction.

Monday, February 26, 2024

Article provided by the SCGA

We picked up this late entry into the 2024 Assembly pile just before we sent out last Wednesday’s Public Affairs Update – a report that was mostly about the way in which Mother Nature and the California Legislature had given us a breather “to focus less on the exigencies of the moment and more on the challenges of the longer term.” “Mostly” but not entirely, as we edited the Update just before sending to indicate that we had tagged AB 3192 for additional scrutiny with an eye toward coalescing SCGA’s partners in the California Alliance for Golf (CAG) around some kind of response.

That “additional scrutiny” has only heightened our resolve to proceed down this road.

SUMMARY

AB 3192 [“Major Coastal Resorts Environmental Accountability Act”] would among other things prohibit the use of “any nonorganic pesticide or fertilizing material at a “major coastal resort” that per the Act is defined as a resort or hotel that meets all of the following:

• Is composed of more than 300 guest rooms or units.
• Includes or operates a golf course on the premises.
• Is located in whole or in part in the coastal zone.
• Is either of the following:
  • Located, in any part, within 100 meters of the mean high tide line of the sea.
  • Includes, is adjacent to, or is within 400 meters of, any part of any of the following:
    • An environmentally sensitive area.
    • A sensitive coastal resource area.
    • An area otherwise protected or preserved under state, federal, or local law, including, but not limited to, marine managed areas and marine protected areas as defined under Section 36602.
    • The habitat of a species protected under state, federal, or local law, including, but not limited to, species that are identified as endangered, threatened, rare, species of concern, or species of special concern by a state or federal agency, and special status species tracked by the Department of Fish and Wildlife’s California Natural Diversity Database.

Per the language of the bill:

“Pesticide” means a conventional pesticide with all active ingredients other than biological pesticides and antimicrobial pesticides, with conventional active ingredients generally produced synthetically, including synthetic chemicals that prevent, mitigate, destroy, or repel any pest or that act as a plant growth regulator, desiccant, defoliant, or nitrogen stabilizer, and shall include insecticides, herbicides, rodenticides, fungicides, and growth regulators.

A broad definition to say the least and certainly one that would include at least some of the products now permitted in California’s Coastal Zone. It’s important to remember that certain non-organic inputs permitted in the rest of California are already prohibited in the area deemed “coastal zone” and regulated as well as permitted separately by the California Coastal Commission.

There are additional proscriptions in the bill related to the use of single use plastics along with additional layers of oversight, stringent compliance audits, and a set of focused whistleblower protections for employees who report violations to state agencies. But it’s the blanket use of all “fertilizing materials” that is of concern to the golf community.

HISTORY

AB 3192 is almost identical to a bill (AB 1590) filed last session that imploded when brought before the Assembly Natural Resources Committee – “imploded” as in coming close to failing to get a second to the motion to move it out of committee, a motion that the bill’s author had to make when none of her colleagues saw fit to move it, and then receiving less than half of the votes required to move it. One of the members who stayed off the bill was none other than the author of this 3192 duplicate, who may be the author, but it’s clear from last year’s Committee hearing that the sponsor of the bill is Unite Here Local 11, and the target of the bill is not so much those resorts in the Coastal Zone and ONLY those resorts in the Coastal Zone that “include or operate a golf course on the premises” but one resort in the author’s District. Labor and this golf course have been enmeshed in a long running labor dispute, which we thought had subsided when the parties reached a settlement last year, but apparently not.

When the bill imploded in committee, it was made clear that both author and sponsor were open to working with many of the organizations that had filed letters opposing the bill unless amended as well as organizations that had filed letters opposing the bill. This wasn’t surprising given the numerous obvious questions that neither the bill’s author, its sponsor, nor its language could answer – questions driven by the bill’s many anomalies, including but hardly limited to its application only to resorts sporting golf courses but not stand-alone resorts or stand-alone golf courses in the Coastal Zone, its failure to define what it means to “include” a golf course, its failure to define what it means to “operate” a golf course, and its creation of a complicated regulatory structure to oversee what may only be six (6) resort properties in a state with 900 miles of coastline.
IMPLICATIONS

The slope here is slippery to say the least! The precedent created by the successful passage of this bill could open the door to discussion of the same blanket 100% prohibition on ALL “fertilizing materials” at all golf courses in the Coastal Zone and perhaps beyond. It could presage something much different and much more impactful than the cascade of restrictions the golf community has become accustomed to accommodating over the years – things such as the addition of more non-organics to the state’s list of prohibited substances, the creation of more invasive auditing protocols, the promulgation of rules that restrict previously unrestricted applications only to those directly licensed by the state, the issuance of reporting mandates requiring ever increasing detail, and the creation of new local, state, and federal discharge permits. The California golf community has managed to not just cope but prosper with all that. But the precedent of a blanket proscription on everything as apparently outlined in AB 3192 is another matter.
CONCLUSION

The California Alliance for Golf (CAG) cannot ignore AB 3192. First order of business is to acquire as much intelligence about the bill, its implications, its amenability to amendment, and its prospects for passage that the members of the Alliance can before determining what the wisest course moving forward might be. That is a process as iterative as it is collaborative; thus, we cannot provide anything more specific or definitive at this early moment other than to share that SCGA and its allied partners in the California Alliance for Golf will be taking the bill very seriously. And given that this may be the only bill in the 2024 hopper that merits such heightened scrutiny, we can still safely conclude that both Mother Nature and the California Legislature have given us a bit of a breather “to focus less on the exigencies of the moment and more on the challenges of the longer-term.”

Tuesday, February 20, 2024

Article provided by the SCGA

Last Friday was the deadline for the filing of 2024 bills. Because 2024 is the second year of California’s two-year legislative session as well as a presidential election year, there were fewer bills filed this year than last. But that doesn’t mean that there weren’t a lot of filings. California’s legislators like to file bills, many of them duplicative. It will take us a few more days to decipher the details of all of them and then determine which among those “details” are in bills that may have some measure of traction, but thus far, our sense is that unlike recent sessions in which the statewide golf community was confronted with impactful bills regarding subjects like independent contracting, non-organic inputs, subsidies to convert municipal golf courses to housing, weakening of Surplus Land Act protections, and prohibitions on the use of potable water for certain types of turf, this session looks benign in comparison, although there is one bill we’ve tagged – AB 3192 (Muratsuchi; D-Torrance) – that has our attention. It’s a version of a similar bill that in 2023 imploded at the Committee level. While there are other prohibitions in AB 3192, the proscription that affects golf, albeit ONLY those golf courses that are parts of resorts in California’s coastal zone, is a blanket prohibition on “the use of any nonorganic pesticide, as defined, or fertilizing material, as defined, at a major coastal resort.” While it would appear that only those golf courses that are tied by ownership to a resort are included in the prohibition, it’s not entirely clear.

There are additional bills dealing with some of the subjects above to be sure, albeit none that are in any way comparable to the two bills (AB 672 and AB 1910) that stimulated the game’s “Public Golf Endangerment Act” campaign or the game’s efforts to preserve a measure of independent contracting for those PGA golf professionals desirous of that status.

The California golf community should use the time-out to be proactive. The game’s issues with water, land use, and the public’s perceptions of both that spell the difference between good and bad outcomes in the public arena aren’t going to disappear during this brief respite.

If we do find disturbing nuggets in the 2024 pile of bills in addition to AB 3192, we’ll certainly let you know. We’re still culling through the deluge of late filings.

In the meantime, we would like to share a couple of bills that aim to begin the process of implementing the hundreds of millions of dollars of general fund allocations enunciated in Governor Newsom’s Executive Order N-82-20 and spelled out in detail in the Governor’s November 2023 “Outdoors for All” initiative calling for the “equitable” provision of access to parks, programs, and nature – in plainer English known as directing investment in urban based needs and programs in addition to the more suburban and exurban needs that have tended to be the beneficiaries of these kinds of commitments cum allocations in California’s past.

Okay, that may not have been “plainer English” as many would describe it. So, let us be blunt. There are two (2) bills in the 2024 file that take aim at the state’s propensity to expend disproportionate resources on the green space, environmental, and recreational tastes and preferences of affluent Californians by focusing more of those resources on California’s tightly packed urban areas that have long been deemed “park poor.” If you understand those places as precisely the places where the game of golf focuses virtually all of its developmental and “grow the game” resources (Team USA notwithstanding) as well as the places that were most endangered by the “Public Golf Endangerment Act,” suffice it to say you are a regular reader of these “Updates” and a follower of SCGA’s campaigns to increase the game’s societal benefit quotient among the 90% of the population that doesn’t play the game.

Two (2) bills in the 2024 hopper, one much better in our opinion than the other. The much better one is AB 2285 (Rendon; D-Lakewood). Its title:“Environmental protection: 30×30 goal: urban nature-based investments: parity.” Two (2) of its “key” declarations:

1. It is the intent of the Legislature to codify the priorities identified in the November 2023 report of the Outdoors for All initiative, “Providing Equitable Access to Parks and Nature,” and to encourage the Governor’s administration and the Legislature, when distributing resources towards conservation and restoration goals during future budgetary deliberations, to ensure parity in allocations toward urban nature-based investments.
2. It is the intent of the Legislature to require state funding entities, including, but not limited to, state conservancies and the Wildlife Conservation Board, when programming and awarding funds to revise, modify, or amend guidelines as necessary to meet the 30×30 goal, to allow for urban nature-based projects on degraded lands to be eligible and competitive for state funds.

AB 2285 specifically references the massive “Parks Needs Assessment” study the County of Los Angeles completed in 2022 as having “piggybacked off the Governor’s and First Partner’s work on the 30×30 goal and “Outdoors for All” and prepared the 2022 Parks Needs Assessment Plus (PNA+) that identifies areas for Los Angeles-based environmental conservation and restoration that form the basis of the 30×30 goal. The three (3) findings the bill makes about the relationship between the author’s intent and this LA County “Assessment” is telling:PNA+ goes beyond traditional conservation models that involve the acquisition and protection of natural lands and reimagines the 30×30 goal through a more equity- and access-facing lens to direct funding and resources into the healing and conversion of blighted, degraded, and otherwise underutilized urban-based lands into green spaces and microhabitats promoting nature-based opportunities, access, and enhanced community and neighborhood aesthetics.Through thorough analysis, PNA+ identifies possible green space acquisition and restoration opportunities within the county and reveals a sharp contrast among regions in the county.PNA+ discovered that most of the available land for acquisition pursuant to the 30×30 goal was in the north County of Los Angeles, an area already rich in park and open-space resources as compared to the south County of Los Angeles, an area richer in diversity and more challenged economically, wherein the opportunities for 30×30 projects are confined to degraded and underutilized lands.

While AB 2285 is very intentional in terms of that component of the Governor’s Executive Order highlighting the need to focus on underserved communities/constituencies, the way in which Los Angeles County’s 2022 “Parks Needs Assessment” study is perfectly suited to effectuate that component of the Governor’s EO, and the need to direct more of the resources called for by the “30 by 30” aspiration contained in that EO (30% more public lands by 2030) to urban California, the “other” bill in the 2024 file that aims to begin the legislative effectuation of the Governor’s November 2023 “Outdoors for All” initiative is more oriented toward the environmental, biodiversity, and coastal aspects of Governor Newsom’s Order, so much so that much of the funding and priorities oversight envisaged therein is reposed in a statewide council dominated by the environmental interests that have long skewed heavily in favor of those kinds of “environmental” concerns (e.g., natural habitat, rewilding, and coastal restoration) that as LA County’s “Needs Assessment” study points out tend to direct public resources in directions opposite of the “equitable outdoor access” that forms one of the pillars of that same Gubernatorial Order.

That “second bill” is AB 2440 (Reyes; D-San Bernardino). It does not reference the Los Angeles County Park Needs Assessment that AB 2285 author Anthony Rendon declared an effectuation of the “equity” principle that suffused so much of the Governor’s “Outdoors for All” Executive Order. Nor does it put the same focus on urban specific investments. As such, it is the much weaker of the two bills in terms of focus on the “park poor” communities where so many of golf’s growth programs are located and dollars invested.

To the degree to which the Southern California golf community has managed to reposition the game in the minds of so many urban park departments and elected leaders as being heavily invested in the golf facilities, programs, and residents who live in these “park poor” communities, there are park departments and elected leaders prepared to invest some portion of the funds envisaged by these bills in municipal golf courses and municipal golf programs.

That discussion is there for the taking, and it is there because of the solid work SCGA has been doing in support of those communities for years, not just in terms of the work the SCGA Junior Golf Foundation has been doing, but as much in terms of just how much emphasis the SCGA has placed on the role that golf can play in those communities for both those who play the game and those who don’t. There are no toolboxes for that, no elevator speeches, no bullet point lists, no best practices – no shortcuts to the long hard work of translating high minded words into the kinds of deeds that convince those who live in those communities and those who represent them that SCGA does these things not out of any sense of “noblesse oblige, but rather because it intends to live the words behind the tag line, “Golf for All.”

It’s why we say as often as we can that our central task is not the parsing of bills and regulations, but rather the narrative that drives the views held by those who don’t play the game. If their view defines the game as too much land that uses too much water to serve the interests of the too few who have had too much for too long, the bills and regulations are not likely to break our way. If their view defines golf as environmental, social, charitable, and recreational contributors to the quality of the lives lived in the communities where golf courses are sited, golf will get fair treatment. The game may even get a few of the dollars envisaged by AB 2285, AB 2440, and other bills calculated to mitigate the dearth of resources dedicated to urban park/green space needs.

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Those interested in AB 2285 and AB 2440 as they were filled by their authors (unamended) can click here for a PDF version of AB 2285 and here for a PDF of 2440. Those interested in tracking the bills as they are amended and move through the legislative process can click here for direction.

The many more of you likely interested in AB 3192 can click here for a PDF version or click here to track it as it is amended and moves through the legislative process.

Wednesday, January 24, 2024

Article provided by Craig Kessler

It’s that time of year when we start to pay close heed to the status of the Sierra snowpack upon which so much of Southern California’s water needs continue to depend – a dependence that the region is busy working to reduce in favor of local supplies – e.g., storm water capture, aquifer replenishment, traditional recycling (non-potable), potable reuse, and desalination.

At the close of 2023 (December 31) things weren’t looking so good. But veterans of this exercise know that it is not where things stand in November/December but where they stand during the three winter months leading up to the all-important April 1 reading that really matters. December 31 – just 26% of the average for that date.

As of Monday (1/22) California was still below overall average; however, enough snow dropped on the Sierras in the three weeks between the New Year and January 22 that the California Department of Water Resources (DWR) reported the snowpack at 55% of the average for that date. That would be 30% of the overall April 1 average if no more snow were to fall between now and then. Of course, more snow has fallen in the days since Monday and more snow is sure to fall, even if the amounts are disappointing.

To put these numbers in context, at this time last year the Sierra snowpack sat at 240% of historical average. That is why despite this year’s somewhat sluggish start, the state’s reservoirs remain well above historical averages. Shasta is currently at 115% of the average and 73% of total capacity. Oroville levels are 128% of the average and 72% of total capacity. Don Pedro reports 114% of average and 80% of total capacity. New Melones is 145% of the average at 83% of total capacity. That is pretty much the pattern across the state, although there are a few reservoirs still below historical averages.

Predicting Mother Nature is a fool’s errand, but it would appear that we are at least not going to suffer a drought year after last year’s incredible bounty. Whether winter 2024 will be average, above average, or below average remains to be seen. Whether ever increasing warming and drying conditions will yield another 3-year run like we suffered 2020-2022 also remains to be seen. But given what we have come to learn about the last quarter century, erring on the side of caution would seem to be in order. The Sierra Snowpack driven State Water Project is but half of Southern California’s import formula. The other half – the Colorado Basin – did not enjoy the same “bounty” as the Sierra Snowpack did last year and is not enjoying much of a resurgence this year either. As Sammy Roth reported this week in the highly informative “Boiling Point” newsletter that he produces on a weekly basis for the Los Angeles Times, “Federal scientists are projecting that Lake Mead — created by Hoover Dam, which interrupts the Colorado River not far from Las Vegas — will fall close to its lowest level ever by the end of 2025.”

Reprieve – relief; use whatever term suits your fancy. Just make sure that you don’t fall into the trap of describing current hydrological conditions as something akin to surcease.

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In our last “Update” (1/8) we took a deep dive into the Legislative Analyst Office’s (LAO) scathing criticism of the State Water Resources Control Board’s (SWRCB) proposed rule to effectuate the Governor’s “Making Conservation a California Way of Life” mandate. Technically, the rule is a regulatory framework to establish individualized efficiency goals for each Urban Retail Water Supplier in the state based upon the unique characteristics of the supplier’s service area along with the flexibility to implement locally appropriate solutions. More thematically, the rule represents a reprise of the successful 20% by 2020 campaign that had been launched in the 1st decade of the 21st Century through the same 3-pronged process of Gubernatorial Order followed in turn by legislation directing SWRCB and DWR (Department of Water Resources) to adopt regulations to enable it.

If you missed it or want to take another deep dive into its particulars, click here. Today we just want to highlight something of significance we failed to highlight two weeks ago.

Agriculture’s use of water has long been the 3^rd rail of California water politics. Despite using the lion’s share of the state’s water and often using that share to grow highly water consumptive crops, it’s the state’s urban dwellers and their uses that have been the targets of conservation initiatives – first indoor uses and more recently outdoor uses. This LAO report takes dead aim at agricultural by suggesting that the savings to be achieved by ever more stringent urban conservation are not sufficient to merit continued ignorance of those agricultural practices that favor highly profitable water consumptive crops. This is a shift that bears watching for what it may portend in terms of easing some of the pressure on outdoor irrigation.

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No January “Update” would be complete without some mention of that first step in the state’s budget process known as the Governor’s initial budget submittal. Between now and when the budget is supposed to be finalized (June 15), there will be much dickering between the executive and legislative branches of government – dickering influenced by a lot of outside lobbying – but it is the Governor’s initial salvo that frames the process in terms of both realities and priorities.

As for the “realities,” by now everyone knows that last year’s near $100 billion surplus has evaporated into what the state’s nonpartisan budget analysts are calling a $68 billion deficit and Governor Newsom is pegging as a $38 billion deficit. Arguably, the only California “whiplash” greater than the one created by a warming/drying climate is the one caused by tax structure disproportionately dependent upon progressive levies upon income and capital gains. But that’s a subject for another day – one that it increasingly appears won’t come in California until it absolutely has to. Tax reform is another of those proverbial “3^rd rails” of California politics.

As for “priorities,” we note that the Governor has proposed $3 billion in cuts to “climate change” programs and delays in anticipated expenditures for the University of California and California State University System, certain social welfare programs, and housing programs, including those targeted for college students and 1^st time buyers. The Governor has also proposed to draw $13.1 billion from the $38 billion in the state’s “rainy day fund” in part to maintain commitments made the last two years to programs to reduce homelessness and extend Medi-Cal to all immigrants. As for raising taxes, the Governor has indicated fierce opposition, including opposition to Assembly Member Alex Lee’s (D-San Jose) proposed 1.5% “wealth tax” on amounts of “net worth” exceeding $50 million.

What might all this mean for California golf? The “realities” make it unlikely that we will see the kind of free money that AB 1910 offered cities/developers to develop municipal golf courses into housing complexes. But they also make it unlikely that we will see some of the generous conservation rebate and incentive programs we have enjoyed in recent years – at the state level, that is. Federal and ratepayer generated rebates/incentives should not be affected.

As for the “priorities,” your guess is as good as ours, although we do take note of the Governor’s willingness to incur the wrath of the myriad environmental organizations that have already begun to complain loudly about those $3 billion in proposed cuts to “climate change” initiatives.

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Much is being made this week at the NGCOA Business Conference and PGA Show in Orlando about just how well golf continues to perform post COVID. Most in golf expected a correction – not a return to pre-COVID numbers, but certainly a dip from the heights golf achieved when it was practically the only game in town in many places for a year or more.

But it now appears that 2023 was even better than 2022. We don’t track state numbers, let alone national numbers. But we do monitor the numbers published by municipalities. And despite a critical shortage that has led to the near impossibility in many places to secure a tee time any time of day, those numbers continue to go up. Of course, given the reality that it is all but impossible to construct a new public golf course anywhere in Southern California’s urban core, those numbers cannot go up unabated. Of course, the prices can. And if you are an owner/operator or someone who labors in the industry or someone in possession of a membership in an equity club, that is good news. If you are a daily fee player, not so much.

But that too is a subject for another day. Today’s subject is the increasingly discernible divergence between traditional golf’s continued growth and “entertainment” golf’s recent dip – a divergence that the Wall Street Journal highlighted last week as part of a much larger story about declines in multiple forms of those tech/electronic substitutes mimicking traditional games/sports that were supposed to overtake their original versions as modern tastes moved to all things electronic, fast, and short.

With the caveat that a discernible dip does not a trend make, what to make of this? But first another caveat. What follows is opinion, commentary if you will – informed opinion we hope, but opinion, nonetheless.

Perhaps the more grounded who have long cautioned about investing in things unproven at the expense of those things that have endured 500 + years were on to something. Perhaps the golf community might be wise to figure out what about 4 hours in nature with good friends far away from the hustle and bustle of the world and emails/virtual meetings playing a game that changes each day with the rhythms of nature offers something that few things in modern American life offer. And we might add, offer it at a price point much less expensive than many of the high tech/electronic substitutes that mimic traditional games/sports. And then maybe consider the lesson we all learned in economics 101 – that it is the unique niche that distinguishes one activity from another in a world filled with an almost unlimited supply of them. Sell what you are, not what you’re not. Promote what you uniquely offer, not what duplicates the offerings of others.

Golf resides in the domain of the long-distance run – staid, steady, and dependable. Perhaps a little more focus on strengths that have proven reliable for 500 + years and a little less obsession with newfangled gadgets is in order.

Or not. Everyone is entitled to an opinion.

Wednesday, December 27, 2023

Article provided by Craig Kessler

Back in early October we reported that the State Water Resources Control Board (SWRCB) was set to hold its first public hearing on the Proposed Rule it published August 18 to effectuate what the Governor and others had termed “Making Conservation a California Way of Life.”

As to what this “Proposed Rule” aimed to achieve, we summarized it generally as a new regulatory framework to establish individualized efficiency goals for each Urban Retail Water Supplier in the state based upon the unique characteristics of the supplier’s service area along with the flexibility to implement locally appropriate solutions.

We also pointed out that the exercise amounted to a reprise of the successful 20% by 2020 campaign that had been launched in the 1st decade of the 21st Century through the same 3-pronged process of Gubernatorial Order followed in turn by legislation directing SWRCB and DWR (Department of Water Resources) to adopt regulations to enable the Order. More specifically, we pointed out that the authority for SWRCB’s envisaged Rule came from two (2) sources: 1) Legislation adopted in 2018 (AB 1668 and SB 606) directing the State Water Board to adopt efficiency standards and performance measures for commercial, industrial, and institutional water use; and 2) the Executive Branch’s August 2022 “Water Supply Strategy” summarizing four (4) broad areas of state action comprising the State’s coordinated strategy for continued water resiliency, the four (4) being: Developing new water supplies, expanding water storage capacity above and below ground by four million acre-feet, reducing demand (conservation), and improving forecasting, data, and management, including water rights modernization.

We summarized the Proposed Rule very specifically as requiring suppliers to annually calculate their objective, defined as the sum of efficiency budgets for a subset of urban water uses, i.e., residential indoor water use, residential outdoor water use, real water loss and commercial, industrial, and institutional landscapes with dedicated irrigation meters. Each efficiency budget would be calculated using a statewide efficiency standard and local service area characteristics such as population, climate, and landscape area. Where relevant, suppliers would be permitted to include in their objective “variances” for unique uses, or a bonus incentive for potable recycled water use. Suppliers would need to meet the overall objective, not each individual budget. It would ONLY be “Urban Retail Water Suppliers” – not individual households or businesses – that would be held to the annual “urban water use objectives” developed thereby.

We concluded that early October “Update” with the obvious: That most of California’s golf courses are served by “Urban Retail Water Suppliers,” and just as 20% by 2020 proved impactful to the California golf community in terms both of access and price, this reprise of that same exercise would prove just as impactful.

SWRCB posted the “Proposed Rule” in August, conducted a mammoth public hearing on it in October, and the Legislative Analyst Office (LAO) issued its “assessment” of it last week. In between a large number of water providers issued their assessment of it, and the comments were not warm to say the least.

Neither was the assessment of the LAO.

Rather than summarize the LAO’s critical assessment, we share the following conclusions drawn verbatim from the LAO’s Executive Summary:

SWRCB’s Proposed Regulations Create Implementation Challenges and Go Beyond What Legislation Requires or DWR Recommends. We find that SWRCB’s proposed regulations will create challenges for water suppliers in several key ways, in many cases without compelling justifications. Specifically, the proposed regulations:Add Complexity. The performance measures suppliers must implement for commercial customers are unnecessarily complex, lack clarity in places, and will be administratively burdensome to implement. Outdoor water use by these customers represents only a small fraction (less than 3 percent) of the state’s total water use. Any savings achieved would be small and come at a large cost to suppliers.Could Be Difficult to Achieve. Although suppliers only have to achieve an aggregate WUO {water use objective} — and not each of the individual standards for indoor and outdoor use— SWRCB proposes such stringent standards for outdoor use that suppliers will not have much “wiggle room” in complying. That is, suppliers may necessarily have to achieve each individual standard if they hope to achieve their overall WUOs.Add Significant Costs. The new framework is estimated to result in cumulative costs in the low tens of billions of dollars from 2025 through 2040. These costs will be borne primarily by suppliers, wastewater agencies, and customers. Particularly in the near term, suppliers’ costs will increase as they attempt to implement the new requirements, such as from providing incentives for residents to make behavioral changes like converting their lawns to more drought tolerant landscapes. Whether the benefits of the new rules ultimately will outweigh the costs is unclear. While an assessment from SWRCB estimates a cumulative net benefit of $2.5 billion, an independent review conducted by a private consulting firm—which raises credible questions about SWRCB’s estimates—projects net costs of $7.4 billion. Moreover, even if benefits outweigh costs in the long run, whether they merit the amount of work and costs to implement the requirements as currently proposed is uncertain.Could Disproportionately Affect Lower-Income Customers. To cover added costs and offset potential revenue reductions from selling less water, suppliers likely will have to increase customer rates. This could adversely impact lower-income customers, who may have more trouble affording the increases and may have less ability to further reduce water use to compensate. Existing constitutional rules make it difficult for suppliers to offer rate assistance programs.Build in Aggressive Timelines. Although the requirements are phased in over multiple years, the timeline for full implementation may be too aggressive given the number of changes that will have to occur to achieve the level of conservation envisioned. In addition, although SWRCB is two years behind adopting final rules, suppliers’ deadlines (which are set in statute) have not been correspondingly adjusted.

Even Modest Water Savings Could Help with Resilience but Will Depend on How the State Manages Those Savings. SWRCB estimates the state could conserve about 440,000 acre-feet of water annually at full implementation, which represents about 1 percent of total state water use. Although this amount of water conservation is modest, it could increase the state’s overall drought resilience if it helps align demand with lower water supplies in dry years. In wet years, the water potentially could be stored for use during drought periods. However, the 2018 legislation did not address how to track and manage these potential water savings. Doing so will be key to maximizing the benefits of these conservation efforts. Urban water savings during wet years will only help local suppliers and/or the state better manage and meet California’s water needs during periods of drought if they are targeted effectively.

Recommendations for Legislative Consideration. To ease suppliers’ administrative burden and potentially reduce costs, we recommend the Legislature use its oversight authority to make several changes to the framework in the near term as well as at key milestones over the coming years. In early 2024, the Legislature could direct SWRCB to simplify several aspects of the framework, such as requirements concerning suppliers’ commercial customers. We also suggest that the Legislature require DWR to provide more technical assistance to suppliers, direct SWRCB to make several of the proposed requirements less stringent (such as the residential outdoor standard), consider how to target state funding to assist lower-income customers, and extend some of the deadlines for suppliers to ensure they can actually achieve the framework’s goals. Finally, to increase the state’s resilience during droughts, we recommend the Legislature develop a strategy to manage and take advantage of any water saved due to these regulations. This is a fundamental step in ensuring that water conserved during wet years is effectively helping to meet the state’s ultimate goals.

We offer three (3) thoughts in conclusion: 1) The details here are great, but that’s where the devils and angels always reside, 2) the disciplining virtues of practicality and reasonableness routinely surface to temper overweening aspiration, and 3) the wise words of MWD General Manager Adel Hagekhalil come to mind: Conservation will always be a key tool in California’s water resiliency toolbox, but if it is the only tool, California fails.

Wednesday, December 27, 2023

Article provided by Craig Kessler

When asked what we do, our standard response is that we operate in all the places where the game of golf and public policy intersect. That’s a lot of places, many of them filled with interests and issues that aren’t always warm to golf’s cause. Because every day we are on the front lines of those unfriendly intersections, we feel obligated to inform those whose lives and jobs aren’t consumed by the red flags that we so routinely confront of the ways in which those other “interests and issues” have the potential to cause golf grief. We end up sounding like modern day Cassandras or Jeremiahs, upsetting everyone with all sorts of warnings, exuding a view of the world that is implacably hostile to the game and those who play it.

Well, that is our job. But that is only half our job. The other half – arguably the more important half – is to explain how such hyper vigilance can enable the golf community to effectively pursue its own interests and issues in those same intersections – not just in a reactive way by overcoming those not so warmly inclined toward us, but in a proactive way by projecting a societal value proposition that causes more and more to have warm feelings about the game and its value to the communities in which it is played, as much if not more so for those who don’t play the game than those who do.

With all that said, or more accurately written, we want to use our last Update of 2023 to share a few recent events at local and state levels that indicate that golf has been making progress in that vein – our way of ending the year with a message redolent of the Holidays. Not to worry; once the calendar turns 2024, we’ll get back to the Jeremiads!

2021’s AB 672 and 2022’s AB 1910 let us know that are indeed people in government who don’t think golf merits the land atop which it sits. More specifically, there are people who believe golf doesn’t merit membership in the public park/recreation community that includes ball fields, picnic areas, swimming pools, tennis courts, pickleball courts, trail systems (equine included), nature preserves, land conservancies, etc. But more importantly, it let us know that there were more in government who believe in the social utility of the public golf courses in their districts, and they believed that before we initiated “The Public Golf Endangerment Act” campaign. That campaign firmed up some of those a priori beliefs and perhaps persuaded others to share them; however, don’t get the idea that this will dissuade those who thought those two bills were good ideas from continuing to believe what they believe about the game’s social utility, dissuade the powerful YIMBY lobby from continuing to pursue the notion of converting golf courses to housing, or dissuade libertarian editorial boards from railing against the very legitimacy of golf’s encumbrance of publicly owned parkland.

On the other hand, the “hand” that should give us cause to believe that the game’s unified effort to make its case for social, community, and environmental value is gaining traction, here are a few things that have transpired in just the last 30 days to brighten your Holiday spirits:The Azusa Planning Commission approved an application to reopen 9 of Azusa Greens’ 18 holes, its driving range, and a limited F/B function. Closed since 2020, the daily fee facility that nurtured Lizette Salas and played host to a San Gabriel Valley Junior Golf Association that for years offered high quality/low-cost junior golf programming will again offer affordable, accessible golf in a region in dire need of it. Because the course is privately held, many assumed that public golf would entirely disappear from the City of Azusa, but because the residents of Azusa and their elected representatives made clear the value they placed on the presence of publicly accessible golf in their city, the new owners of the property determined to propose the retention of substantial golf along with some much needed housing – exactly the kind of compromise arrangement that golf routinely supports.The County of Los Angeles and Plenitude announced that they would be parting ways February 1, ending all efforts to commercially repurpose the county’s Victoria Park Golf Course in Carson. On that date Touchstone, an experienced, respected GOLF management company, will assume management of the facility. In early January, the county will conduct an evening community meeting where the county and Touchstone will explain what this means going immediately forward in terms of restoring the facility to a measure of playability as well as what might be in the offing longer term. What six years ago seemed to presage the elimination of all golf at this 180-acre parkland parcel is now a discussion of how much golf to maintain at the site.The San Diego Planning Commission approved an amendment to its Mission Bay Master Plan that maximized “active” recreation in the 4,000-acre park, included among those active recreational amenities the Mission Bay Golf Course and Practice Facility. While there are a few “devils” in the details of what is now a very generic plan, given the golf community’s robust engagement in the public processes and meetings that the city has held over the last 8 months, we are confident that those “devils” will be worked out very much to the satisfaction of the San Diego public golf community. What began as a campaign by some to convert the entire parcel into wetlands and others as a campaign to “rewild” much of it is ending a process that made clear that San Diegans treasure their active recreation, including but certainly not limited to golf.The comment period closes January 2 on the City of Los Angeles’ Draft Sepulveda Basin Vision Plan. As reported in a previous Update, a “Plan” that initially proposed three options regarding the Basin’s 54 holes of regulation length city-owned/operated public golf – the elimination of 9, 18, or 27 holes – in its final Draft form out for comment maintains all 54 holes and proposes to “improve” 18 of them. As with Azusa, Los Angeles County, and San Diego, another example of an organized golf community doing nothing more than getting into the arena and stating the FACTS of its case and finding that it persuades communities and office holders.The City of Camarillo rejected a proposal to redevelop the privately held daily fee 18-hole regulation Camarillo Springs Golf Course as a 12-hole course and practice facility along with housing, a project that SCGA endorsed because it offered what is still in our opinion the only route to maintaining some golf on the site; however, the rejection was due entirely to a desire to maintain all 18 holes of golf, not an objection to the substantial golf component contained therein. The degree to which the Camarillo City Council comes to understand the proposal or some modified version of it as the only feasible way to keep regulation golf on the site is the degree to which it is likely that some version of the proposal wends its way back for consideration. But again, another solid example of how communities and elected leaders view golf courses as assets – social, recreational, environmental, and communitarian.

These are but five (5) very recent examples – three in the municipal sector, two in the daily fee sector. There were many more in 2023. Taken together, they should embolden the game to stay the course in continuing to proudly project its societal value proposition and do so more as happy warriors than shopworn cynics.

At the state level we take note that Governor Newsom seems to be taking a page out of his predecessor’s book. Jerry Brown always defined his role as steering the ship of state back to the middle – steering a little right or a little left when necessary to keep things flowing down the middle. Of course, in California that usually requires a rightward steer, albeit not always. And that is what we can discern from a series of recent Gubernatorial moves in recent weeks, to wit:Consistent with the Governor Newsom’s “Water Supply Strategy” and with the full support of the Governor’s Administration the California Department of Water Resources has just approved the Delta Water Conveyance (Sacramento River Tunnel Project) over objections from environmental groups that the money would be better spent on alternative means of weaning the state off exports. This puts the Governor in line with the Southern California Metropolitan Water District (MWD) and other water agencies that argue for a “one water” strategy that does a bit of everything to achieve greater water supply resiliency, including projects that siphon water southward from the Delta to farms and cities. While a key tool in every sector’s toolbox, conservation alone will not suffice.With a budget deficit now determined to be $68 billion, Governor Newsom has let it be known that he will be seeking major changes to the bill raising the minimum wages of health care workers to $25 that he signed just a couple of months ago – an indicator of greater caution as the state continues to address what its body politic has identified as too wide a gap between wages and prices.The life of the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Plant on California’s Central Coast has been extended yet again to 2030 in deference to the Administration’s fear that a warming/drying climate runs the risk of ramping up power needs that simply cannot be met by some of the “greener” methods the state is rapidly trying to develop to displace reliance upon fossil fuels, e.g., wind and solar power – a clear indicator that a certain balance will maintain as the state aims at a carbon free future.Despite opposition and lawsuits, the state continues to move to forward on the huge Sites Reservoir – again, confirming that when it comes down to it, the current Administration is not sufficiently confident in alternative storage methodologies to abandon above surface storage entirely.

Unlike our municipal/daily fee facility examples, these are not the kinds of issues the golf community elects to engage in, but they are the issues the golf community tracks closely to determine what to expect with respect to those issues that do directly affect golf. They are the bellwether issues that can inform the game as to the efficacy of some of the bills routinely filed each session that the game would find alarming were they to find their way to the state’s Codes. There is no point in wasting energy on matters highly unlikely to gain traction. There is no point in unduly alarming folks either. There are occasions when it is necessary to call the game to action – e.g., AB 1910 – but that is the exception, not the rule. And if the game can continue along a trajectory of slowly but surely advancing the societal value proposition of the game beyond the ranks of the converted to the ranks of the 90% who don’t play golf, the exception can become just that much more exceptional.

Let’s not focus so much on the defeat of the two “Public Golf Endangerment Acts” that we lose sight of how well golf has fared regarding a number of other important legislative and regulatory issues in recent years. From the exceptions in AB 5 and AB 2257 that allow for independent contracting teaching to the licensed applicator permissions in the legislation making neonicotinoids banned substances to the specific reference to “golf courses” as part of the exempt recreational community in this year’s proscription on the use of potable water to irrigate “non-functional” turf (AB 1572), golf has fared well.

Also, let’s not focus so much on the challenges posed by aridification that we lose sight of just how well the game has fared in working with its water providers to lower its water footprint in ways consistent with sound agronomic and business practices, making it possible to weather multiple droughts by remaining in the good graces of providers while maintaining access to the water necessary to remain in business.

# # # # # # # # # # #

That is our Holiday message, and it is one of optimism. Yes, some of the challenges are daunting. Yes, there are those that just don’t like our game and oppose it at every turn. Yes, there are problems that can at times seem intractable. But golf has proven over and over again that if it will organize itself around its many strengths, tackle the arduous work of communicating those strengths to all who will listen, and never succumb to cynicism and defeatism, it can not only survive, but thrive.

Happy Holidays. See you in the New Year.

DECEMBER 18, 2023

The California Alliance for Golf (CAG), the “United Voice for Golf” in the Golden State, recently held its 2023 general membership meeting with representation from nearly all major allied golf organizations within the state.

Election of CAG board officers was held, and by unanimous vote the following individuals were re-elected to serve another one-year term: James “Jim” Ferrin, CGGS, as president, Len Dumas, PGA, as vice president, and Azucena Maldonado, LGA, as secretary.

“I look forward to continue serving the organization in a leadership role,” said President Ferrin, “as there’s still plenty of work ahead for the Alliance as we continue to protect and advocate for the California golf industry. We have made significant headway in recent years, thanks to the support of the CAG board of directors and the allied organizations they represent, as well as from public golfers at the grassroots level. We are committed to raising our visibility and our voices, not just in Sacramento but at the local and regional levels too.”

CAG’s advocacy efforts focus on a variety of areas that impact the business of golf. They include: water resources, land use, environmental leadership and sustainability, preservation of community recreation and programs that benefit veterans, youth, women, and seniors.

To learn more about the California Alliance for Golf (CAG) visit: https://cagolf.org/about-us/mission-statement/  and to support CAG during this season of giving visit: https://cagolf.org/join-us/.

Contact:
The California Alliance for Golf
EmmyPGA@aol.com

Monday, November 27, 2023

Article provided by Craig Kessler, SCGA

Last week new Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas (D-Hollister) issued next term’s committee assignments, including the chairs of each respective committee. While much has been written about who is in, who is out, and what it all portends for the 2024 legislative term and beyond to the degree to which it is highly likely that Speaker Rivas will be Speaker for many years to come, here is what we think it means very specifically for the game and industry of golf in California.

Other than the general northward tilt that going from a Southern California based Speakership in the form of Anthony Rendon (D-Lakewood) to a Northern California based Speakership in the form of Robert Rivas (D-Hollister), what golf needs to pay closest attention to is the way in which the entire Assembly reorganization represented a huge victory for YIMBY (Yes in my Backyard).

To refresh your memories, YIMBY is the organization that pushed hard for AB 1910, the bill that would have provided massive subsidies and planning shortcuts to developers and cities seeking to repurpose municipal golf courses as housing complexes with a certain affordable housing component – the “Public Golf Endangerment Act” or “Park Endangerment Act” as SCGA and the California Alliance for Golf (CAG) tagged it in what turned out to be a successful effort to kill the bill in its House of Origin.

We already knew that Rivas would be warm toward obviating local control in favor of fast-tracking anything purporting to facilitate the construction of affordable housing by the way in which he rushed so many such bills when he assumed the Speakership at the end of the 2023 session.

But last week’s committee assignments made clear that “warm” is sure to turn to “hot” in the 2024 legislative session. Rivas has elevated multiple pro-housing members and demoted others who have demonstrated fealty to local control, which can only mean that next year’s session is sure to be very aggressively pro-housing per state obviations and pre-emptions.

Cal Matters Capitol reporter Ben Christopher quotes YIMBY spokesperson Matthew Lewis in a November 22 story as follows: “Speaker Rivas has been consistent in his leadership on housing and also his desire to make the Legislature a place that passes more transformative housing policy; from our perspective these committee assignments pretty much reflect that.” “About as good as it gets,” Christopher further quotes Lewis.

What YIMBY finds “about as good as it gets” is the ascension of Buffy Wicks (D-Oakland) to the Chair of the Appropriations Committee along with the ascension of Chris Ward (D-San Diego) to the Chair of the Housing Committee. Wicks was warm toward AB 1910. Ward dismissed the significance of AB 1910 despite having a District containing multiple municipal golf courses, content that courses such as Coronado Municipal and Torrey Pines were not likely to be affected. Of course, facilities like Mission Bay, already a subject of “wilders” pushing to turn it into wetlands, would very much have been affected.

Being a housing advocate is not the point. Most if not all of those lawmakers who found AB 1910 a flawed piece of legislation are/were also affordable housing advocates. It’s just that they agreed with the Los Angeles Times that municipally owned parkland in park poor communities was about the last place the state ought to be looking to solve its housing shortage, municipal golf courses very much included.

2022-2023 Assembly Appropriations Chair Chris Holden (D-Pasadena), who most definitely did not support AB 1910 and ultimately held it in the 2022 session, has not only been displaced as Chair; he has been removed entirely from the Committee. Tasha Boerner Horvath (D-Oceanside), who stayed off AB 672 and AB 1910 when they came before the Local Government Committee, hasn’t been given any plum chairmanships in the 2024 session.

Combine all of the above with that disturbing July 5 editorial carried by the nine (9) newspapers of the Southern California News Group advocating for the resurrection of AB 1910 in the 2024 legislative session, and it’s clear what the California golf community needs to keep a close eye on in 2024. Keep a close eye on and remember that you only surprise people once – smart people anyway, and YIMBY is a very smart, very politically savvy, and very well-funded group.

The National Golf Foundation (NGF) long ago identified urban Southern California as the most golf starved region of the country – the most golfers chasing the fewest golf holes. If anything, the supply to demand ratio has worsened since the NGF made that identification. Supply is slightly down and holds zero prospect for increasing given the prohibitive cost of land. Demand is way up and contrary to many who thought it would slide a bit once COVID was behind us, it appears that those brought into the game or back to the game during the pandemic are sticking with it. If today’s limited supply is further limited by a feeding frenzy on the state’s public stock, particularly the portion of it that has long served as the game’s growth engine, well, we don’t need to connect the dots.

For all you policy wonks, here are some of the key 2024 Assembly Leadership Roles and Committee Chairs:

Robert Rivas (D-Hollister) as Speaker
Cecilia Aguiar-Curry (D-Davis) as Majority Leader
Miguel Santiago (D-Los Angeles) as Assistant Majority Leader
Jim Wood (D-Healdsburg) as Speaker Pro Tempore.
Miguel Santiago (D-Los Angeles) as Assistant Majority Leader.
Matt Haney (D-San Francisco) as Majority Whip
Buffy Wicks (D-Oakland) as Chair of the Appropriations Committee
Jesse Gabriel (D-Encino) as Chair of the Budget Committee
Kevin McCarty (D-Sacramento) as Chair of the Public Safety Committee
Chris Ward (D-San Diego) as Chair of the Housing Committee
Liz Ortega (D-San Leandro) as Chair of the Labor/Employment Committee
Lori Wilson (D-Suisun City) as Chair of the Transportation Committee
Ash Kalra (D-San Jose) as Chair of the Judiciary Committee.
Blanca Rubio (D-Baldwin Park) as Chair of Governmental Organization.
Alex Lee (D-San Jose) as Chair of Human Services.
Rebecca Bauer-Kahan (D-Orinda) as Chair of Privacy and Consumer Protection.
Diane Papan (D-San Mateo) as Chair of Water, Parks and Wildlife.
Mia Bonta (D-Alameda) as Chair of Health Committee.
Juan Carrillo (D-Palmdale) as Chair of the Local Government Committee

Enjoy the Holidays and then strap yourselves in for what promises to be a bumpy ride as we figure out what this new era in the Assembly means for the California golf community. Not necessarily “bumpy” as in ominous; just bumpy as in unknowable.

Monday, October 20, 2023

Article provided by Craig Kessler, SCGA

he Director penned an article in SCGA’s hard copy magazine FORE entitled, “The Era of Recycled Water May be Drawing to a Close.” The kind of recycled water used for outdoor irrigation, that is – nonpotable reuse.

The reason: The effluent used to produce that traditional form of recycled water was going to soon be routinely used to create drinking water – a process known as potable reuse. In addition, more of that effluent was going to be used to recharge aquifers. Indeed, both processes had already begun by October 2017. Orange County had already pioneered a potable reuse facility in Fountain Valley, and Los Angeles Water & Power had already begun dedicating effluent to the recharging of the large aquifer sitting beneath the Northeastern San Fernando Valley.

Fast forward to Fall 2023, and the Southern California Metropolitan Water District is on track to open the largest potable reuse facility in 2032 in the heart of the LA Harbor area, and the State Water Resources Control Board (SWRCB) has embarked upon the Rulemaking process necessary to amend Title 22 of the State Water Code to “adopt regulations governing the use of municipal wastewater to produce water that is used to augment a source of supply for a public water system’s drinking water treatment plant or placed into a public water system’s drinking water distribution system.” As SWRCB puts it in its “Initial Statement of Reasons” for the new Rules, the benefits include providing safe drinking water, a safe drinking water supply for Californians, a relatively reliable, drought-proof, and sustainable option for drinking water, and an additional means for increased beneficial use of recycled water.

The effluent to provide golf’s recycled water is going to be increasingly dedicated to potable reuse, making the admonition we issued in that 2017 FORE story more relevant than ever:

Now would be the time to consider the upshot of all of this — not just for those golf courses that had hoped to gain recycled access at some future time, but for those golf courses whose recycled contracts will be coming up for renewal. It behooves the former class of golf courses to begin contemplating what comes next in an environment sure to become increasingly hostile to “watering golf courses with drinking water.” It behooves the latter class to approach their water suppliers with entreaties to extend extant contracts before they come due.

And it behooves all of us to pay closer heed to those who preach the need to think in blocks of time longer than the next quarter.

Those with enormous appetites for detail can read the SWRCB’s entire “Initial Statement of Reasons” by clicking here. The only update to that October 2017 FORE story we would issue today would be to change the title ever so slightly to “The Era of Recycled Water is Fast Closing.”

There are still opportunities to secure access, but they won’t be there for long, and not just due to the expansion of direct potable reuse, but due also to the competition for limited resources posed by the myriad other ways of expanding local supplies such as stormwater capture, aquifer recharge, and desalination.

For those of you who want to see just how prescient that October 2017 FORE was, you can click here to read an archived version of it on the SCGA website

2023 LEGISLATIVE SESSION – FINAL WORD

Our last “Update” detailed the one piece of water legislation (AB 1572 – Proscription upon the use of potable water to irrigate nonfunctional turf) that we considered the most positively impactful to the statewide golf community to get signed into law in the 2023 legislative session – “positively impactful” because golf is specifically referenced as “recreational” and/or “functional” turf exempt from the proscription, language sure to be copied and pasted into all sorts of future bills and regulations, not just at the state level, but at the local and regional levels as well.

Previous updates detailed what we believe to be the opening of a long process to upend the senior water rights conferred in 1850, 1873, and 1913 to reflect the radically changed circumstances of modernity – that opening being SB 389, a new law that gives the state the data and reach it will need to determine whether a water right is valid, otherwise understood by many as the first step to enforcing or vitiating those rights. AB 460 and AB 1337 are parallels that didn’t quite make it through the 2023 session but are in process of being substantially amended to make credible 2-year bill runs in January 2024. We’ll be eagerly watching. Whether they make it through that tight window or not, we expect them and other similar bills to be filed and refiled in the 2024 session and beyond.

Another bright spot for golf was AB 363 – a bill signed into law that establishes neonicotinoids as substances banned unless applied by “licensed applicators.” The 2022 version of the bill, which was vetoed by Governor Newsom, allowed application only by agricultural licensed applicators. The signed 2023 version allows application by all licensed applicators, which allows the California golf community to continue their use, which though limited, can be important at certain times and in certain places. Kudos to the GCSAA, which lobbied hard for the 2023 version that Governor Newsom signed.

As we suggested in an earlier “Update” entitled, “Heeding Labor’s Roar,” California is in the throes of a massive recalibration of the rules governing worker’s wages, benefits, and rights in strong favor of labor. The “roar” didn’t extend all the way to SB 799 becoming law, because Governor Newsom vetoed the last-minute gut-and-amend bill that would have granted striking workers unemployment benefits. But here are the bills the Governor did sign in the 2023 session:

AB 1 – Collective bargaining: legislature. Enacted the Legislature Employer-Employee Relations Act, to provide employees of the Legislature, except certain specified categories of excluded employees, the right to form, join, and participate in the activities of employee organizations of their own choosing for the purpose of representation on all matters of employer-employee relations.

AB 621 – Workers’ compensation: special death benefit. Expands an exemption to include state safety members, peace officers, and firefighters for the Department of Forestry and Fire Protection who are members of Bargaining Unit 8 and would apply the exemption for these employees retroactively to January 1, 2019, for injuries not previously claimed or resolved.

AB 1228 – Gives raises to fast food workers – $20/hr.

SB 332 – Minor league baseball player bargaining agreement. Ensures a collective bargaining agreement for minor league baseball, guaranteeing better wages and benefits for more than 360 California minor league players, such as housing, health care, and compensation, including in the regular season, spring training, and the off-season.

SB 497 – Reduces retaliation against workers who have filed wage claim or unequal wage complaint.

SB 525 – $25/hr. Healthcare workers.

SB 616 – Add paid sick days. Amends California’s paid sick leave law to expand mandatory paid sick leave from three days or twenty-four hours to five days or forty hours.

Expect more of the same in 2024. While golf has punched way above its political weight on those matters directly related to the game, e.g., AB 672, AB 1910, and AB 2257 in previous legislative sessions and AB 1572 and AB 363 in the just concluded 2023 session, it isn’t a productive use of golf’s limited time and even more limited resources to engage as heavily on bills that affect all businesses in California. The game is irrelevant in a space dominated by the California Chamber of Commerce, various local/regional business chambers and roundtables, not to mention specific sectors that dwarf golf in economic reach and impact. However, it often makes sense to support the efforts of these larger entities through membership in their ranks or as part of large diverse coalitions, so long as the effort doesn’t otherwise detract from the game’s greater framing and positioning strategies.

SEPULVEDA BASIN “VISION PLAN”

A local example but an instructive one in a long string of examples of how a golf association can amass the facts of the matter as opposed to a version of them provided by those intent on repurposing golf course land for their preferred use, make those facts known to the decision-makers, and then rally its members and member clubs behind those “facts” to get a verdict in the public arena favorable to golf’s cause.

To the many SCGA members who responded to SCGA’s call to action about the “Sepulveda Basin Vision Plan” we are happy to inform you that the City of Los Angeles’ “Draft Plan” is now out for public comment and contains 54 holes of golf with a suggestion that 18 of them (Woodley Lakes) be upgraded and refreshed.

A ”Plan” that began with options to eliminate 9, 18, or 27 holes of municipal/public golf in the heart of Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley has concluded with the maintenance of 54 holes that are to be improved in three (3) ways: 1) The “refresh/upgrade” of Woodley Lakes, 2) the re-routing of those holes on the Encino Golf Course that are the first to flood when the LA River’s waters are diverted during heavy rainfall events, and 3) the repurposing of the unused acreage surrounding much of the three Basin golf courses as natural habitat.

The ”Plan” is now so beneficial to this bulwark of San Fernando Valley public golf that the SCGA was able to issue a hearty endorsement of it in the Los Angeles Daily News.

The SCGA will issue a formal comment to that effect along with a suggestion that we believe will be well received to consider the construction of a junior golf/developmental golf similar to the Tregnan Golf Academy in Griffith Park within the footprint of the current Woodley Lakes Golf Course – a “comment” that we also believe will have the full support of the city’s Recreation and Park Department.

Those of you with appetite for reviewing the full 272-page “Draft Plan” thereon can click here to review the Homepage of the website the city has created for the project. The Homepage connects you both to the full “Plan” and a simple electronic form that allows you to seamlessly and very quickly issue your own comments upon it, something we highly encourage you to do. It’s important that golfers make clear the need to maintain 54 holes of desperately needed public golf in the heart of the San Fernando Valley. No doubt there will be those who issue comments about reducing that existing golf. And consider throwing in the need for a junior golf developmental facility while you’re at it.

Tuesday, October 17, 2023

Article provided by Craig Kessler, SCGA

Often attributed to Albert Einstein, who many say wrote it on a blackboard in his Princeton office, its origin is much older than that. However, in this exact form, it appeared in a seminal sociology textbook in 1963 and has been quoted repeatedly since to highlight the fact that certain important matters are simply not amenable to quantification.

And nothing could be truer of what we lump under the general term, “advocacy.” Advocacy operates in ALL the places where the game and public policy intersect. That’s a lot of places – legislatures, regulatory agencies, city councils, boards of supervisors, special districts, water wholesalers, water retailers, planning commissions, advisory commissions, chambers of commerce, allied advocacy organizations, non-governmental organizations of various stripes, and last but hardly least, all forms of media. Not just a lot of places, but a lot of broad issues – water, environment, taxes, land use, labor, etc. And the places and issues are less about transactions than relationships, which are less amenable to quantification than most other things. And not so much personal relationships as business/professional relationships predicated on respect, trust, and credibility. Those of you skeptical of anything having to do with government may find it hard to believe, but one’s word is indeed one’s bond in that realm.

There are no charts, graphs, lists, or sets of metrics capable of providing snapshots of the shape shifting and nuance represented by the sum total of this. There are broad themes, narratives, and overarching strategies, but they too are not amenable to simple quantification.

And there is no better example of the principle than Assembly Bill 1572 (Friedman; D-Burbank). Signed into law by Governor Newsom over the weekend, the bill proscribes the use of potable water to irrigate non-functional turf not directly attached to personal residences. The bill won the overt support of the California Alliance for Golf (CAG) based almost entirely on the appearance of two simple words in the section that defines the “recreational use areas” exempt from the proscription. We have highlighted those two words in the following AB 1572 excerpt:

“Recreational use area” means an area designated by a property owner or a governmental agency to accommodate human foot traffic for recreation, including, but not limited to, sports fields, golf courses, playgrounds, picnic grounds, or pet exercise areas. This recreation may be either formal or informal.”

To the degree to which there are likely to be those who may continue to argue that golf is a nonfunctional or non-recreational use of turf, the language embedded in this law argues very definitively otherwise. To the degree to which language like this is often cut and pasted in future legislation, this is the language that will function as the default position for that legislation, putting those arguing otherwise in the position of having the burden of proving why the language merits changing – always a tough hill to climb.

We hope you understand that things like this happen due ONLY to years of focused effort to position the game in a certain way in a public mind that is all inclusive, not specific – a long distance run characterized more by strategy than tactics, not a transaction characterized by simple notions of reduction, e.g., bullet points, talking points, and toolkits.

We hope you also understand that the degree to which we are so routinely able to report positive outcomes in the places where the game and public policy intersect is the degree to which we have been able to work with the game’s allied organizations and stakeholders to advance the game’s value proposition to the 90% of the population that does not play golf. Just as diplomacy is the art of bridging differences between adversaries, advocacy is the art of finding common ground among strangers.

One in a series of occasional looks at the backstory. Next up: A full look at the 2023 legislative session’s front story.

Monday, October 2, 2023

Article provided by Craig Kessler, SCGA

The State Water Resources Control Board (SWRCB) is set this Wednesday to open its first public hearing on the Proposed Rule it published August 18 to effectuate what the Governor and others have termed “Making Conservation a California Way of Life.” The Board will open that hearing with a 4-hour staff presentation, which should give you some idea of just how epochal the Rule purports to be. Those with enormous appetites for detail can click here to read it.

What is “Making Conservation a California Way of Life?” It is many things, but in simple terms it is a new regulatory framework that establishes individualized efficiency goals for each Urban Retail Water Supplier. These goals are based on the unique characteristics of the supplier’s service area and give suppliers the flexibility to implement locally appropriate solutions, a feature that makes this epochal moment an improvement over some of the State’s past one-size-fits-all moments. Once implemented, these goals are expected to reduce urban water use by more than 400-thousand-acre feet by 2030. Given that most of the state’s golf stock is served by Urban Water Districts, golf’s stake in all this is obvious if not always direct.

The proposed regulation would require suppliers to annually calculate their objective, which is the sum of efficiency budgets for a subset of urban water uses: residential indoor water use, residential outdoor water use, real water loss and commercial, industrial, and institutional landscapes with dedicated irrigation meters. Each efficiency budget will be calculated using a statewide efficiency standard and local service area characteristics such as population, climate, and landscape area. Where relevant, suppliers may also include in their objective “variances” for unique uses, or a bonus incentive for potable recycled water use. Suppliers would need to meet the overall objective, not each individual budget. It is only “Urban Retail Water Suppliers” – not individual households or businesses – that will be held to the annual “urban water use objectives” developed thereby.

Why is SWRCB adopting this epochal Rule? While the State did for the most part achieve most of the goals it set for itself in the 20% by 2020 Rule adopted in the 1^st decade of this Century, continued drought, wide swings in Sierra snow deposition, and the rapid aridification of the Colorado Basin have made it necessary to adopt another set of long-term goals to ensure the State’s ability to deliver the water necessary to sustain life, health, business, agriculture, and recreation at levels consistent with the expectation of population growth.

The authority for SWRCB’s envisaged Rule comes from two (2) sources: 1) Legislation adopted in 2018 (AB 1668 and SB 606) directing the State Water Board to adopt efficiency standards and performance measures for commercial, industrial, and institutional water use; and 2) the Executive Branch’s August 2022 “Water Supply Strategy” summarizing the four (4) broad areas of state action comprising the State’s coordinated strategy for continued water resiliency:

1.Developing new water supplies.

2.Expanding water storage capacity above and below ground by four million acre-feet.

3.Reducing demand.

4.Improving forecasting, data, and management, including water rights modernization.

The last point is bolded to emphasize a point we’ve made repeatedly about what we find to be the most important takeaway from the just completed 2023 legislative session – that the unraveling of those water rights long-held (since 1850, 1873, and 1913 to be precise) and long considered sacred has only just begun. Again, while not always directly related to golf, particularly in the short term, this is all certainly impactful to the degree to which the final destination of that unraveling is sure to affect golf’s access to water – and to the price of that access.

The first two strategies – developing new water supplies and expanding storage capacity – are gravy for a water consumptive sector like golf. The last strategy with its ancillary goal of “modernizing” water rights is in its infancy but bears close scrutiny and no doubt at some point perhaps even some narrow intervention. It’s the third strategy – reducing demand – that demands golf’s attention in the SWRCB Rulemaking just now getting into high gear to ensure that golf continues to be categorized as a “special” or “large landscape” meriting biologically appropriate plant factors in state regulations (e.g., MWELO), a “functional” use of turf meriting the continued use of potable water where non-potable sources are unavailable, and a “recreational” use the same as parks and sports fields to keep it firmly in that class of public amenity that can only be provided on turf. Of course, to do that, golf will have to not only continue, but double down on, its commitment to reducing its water footprint. This demands investment in new technologies, new practices, and new grasses, as well as the research that is the sine qua non of all three.

THERE IS MORE AVAILABLE THAN THE STANDARD TURF REMOVAL REBATE AND WITH A LITTLE INGENUITY AND PATIENCE PERHAPS MORE ON THE WAY

“If you have a creative idea for saving water on your golf course, we have a rebate program for you,” announced the Metropolitan Water District’s (MWD) Gary Tilkian at last month’s golf and water networking session in downtown Los Angeles, where leaders of the golf community met with leaders of MWD, Los Angeles Water & Power, Long Beach Water, and other water providers to collaborate on ways to further reduce the game’s water footprint.

Formally called the “Water Savings Investment Program” (WISP), the MWD program differs from traditional rebate programs in that it is performance based. You don’t get paid up front. You get paid as you demonstrate that your “creative idea” saves water.

How the program works:The application must be approved before the project is deployed or installed to ensure funding eligibility.Projects must save at least 10 million gallons of water over ten years.Projects cannot be new construction.Customers require at least three years of water use history to establish a baseline before the project is deployed.Projects cannot replace potable water with another water source as a water-saving method.

Los Angeles Water & Power (LADWP) has a parallel program it calls its “Technical Assistance Program” or TAP for short. At the networking session LADWP Conservation Manager Mark Gentili explained the program the way his agency explains it on its website.

“Sometimes one size doesn’t fit all. Commercial, industrial, institutional, and multi-family customers may benefit from a customized approach to reducing their water use and costs. . . The program offers up to $2,000,000 in financial incentives for pre-approved equipment and products that demonstrate water savings.”

Once a golf course upgrades its irrigation system, removes turf, replaces nozzles, and pursues the investments for which traditional rebates and financial incentives are available, it runs out of cards to play in a game of water footprint reduction that golf has to keep playing if it hopes to thrive in an environment in which supplies from the Sierra Nevada are subject to wide swings and supplies from the Colorado River are guaranteed to be significantly curtailed.

SCGA helped organize this networking session to help spread the word; there are customized, golf specific programs that major water agencies are eager to work with golf to craft and then fund. To that end, the session was capped off by a presentation to Brentwood Country Club of a 1st installment of what is “on track” to eventually be a $67,000.00 rebate for a soil-based conservation program that is anything but “traditional” to the golf industry.

Many of MWD’s retailers – e.g., LADWP – offer parallel “performance based” incentives, which allows a golf course to receive additional monies for the same program – double dip as it were.

The session was sufficiently successful that MWD has decided to take the same show on the road to San Diego County to join forces with the San Diego County Water Authority, San Diego Public Utilities, and whatever other MWD member agencies care to participate to share the same good news about these programs. SCGA will certainly do what it can to help coordinate, facilitate, and advertise the event.

We can report that parallel thinking is going on right now in the Coachella Valley, where the CVWD Golf & Water Task Force is working to craft rebate programs that incentivize more than just turf removal.

For more information about the MWD program click here. For further information about the LADWP program click here. If you’re reading this from San Diego County, stay tuned. The SCGA will keep you informed. If you’re reading this from the Coachella Valley, follow the progress of the Golf & Water Task Force that meets regularly with the Coachella Valley Water District – that and the constant updating from the Hi-Lo Chapter GCSAA.

These more “creative” or “performance based” incentive programs may seem small, but today’s “small” often becomes tomorrow’s large. And they can never become large unless they start small. Everything golf does in terms of conservation is a long-distance run, not a sprint.

Monday, September 18, 2023

Article provided by Craig Kessler, SCGA

The 2023 session of the California Legislature closed in the waning hours of Thursday night. While some of 2023’s bills have already been passed on to the Governor and signed into law, many more are now on the Governor’s desk for signature or veto, among them AB 1572 (Friedman; D-Burbank), which proscribes the use of potable water to irrigate purely ornamental or non-functional turf. Not on the Governor’s desk is Friedman’s companion bill (AB 1573) that would have enshrined that proscription in the state’s Model Water Efficient Landscape Ordinance (MWELO). Friedman pulled the bill because the amendments necessary to cause the politically powerful Association of California Water Agencies (ACWA) to withdraw opposition rendered the bill meaningless in the opinion of the author.

Golf is very much “functional” and “non-ornamental” turf in extant California law, and because the final version of AB 1572 spelled that out in very direct language, the California Alliance for Golf (CAG) formally supported the bill when it came before Senate Appropriations. CAG supported AB 1573 as well.

The Governor has until October 14 to sign or veto AB 1572 and the hundreds of other bills that made it through both houses last Thursday night.

Three (3) bills were filed in the 2023 session that in the opinion of virtually everyone who tracks water issues in California represented the opening of an extended legislative conversation about unraveling long-held, almost sacred water rights in California law – “long-held” as in dating back to California’s entry into the Union (1850), California’s codification of certain “riparian” rights in 1872, and a recodification of both when the precursor to today’s State Water Resources Control Board (SWRCB) was created in 1913.

Two of those bills – AB 460 (Bauer-Kahan; D-Orinda) that would have authorized the State Water Board to issue “interim relief” orders to enforce the reasonable use doctrine and water rights and AB 1337 (Wicks; D-Oakland) that would have authorized the State Water Board to issue curtailment orders for any diversion, even pre-1914 appropriative rights – were pulled late in the session by their authors because there just wasn’t enough legislative bandwidth cum time to issue the amendments that would have enabled them to continue in the session; however, in both cases the authors made clear that both would be the subjects of very serious 2-year bill runs in January 2024.

However, one bill (SB 389; Allen – D-Redondo Beach) made it through the gauntlet and is now on the Governor’s desk. If Newsom signs it, and smart money would be on him doing that, it will tell us much about the prospects of the two bills trying to secure passage in January.

As originally introduced in February, SB 389 proposed the addition of a new article to the Water Code authorizing the State Water Board to:

• Investigate a diversion and use of water from a stream system to determine whether the diversion and use are based upon a valid right;
• Issue an information order to a water user to provide technical reports or other information related to the diversion;
• Issue a decision or order that determines the water right, whether limited in scope or wholly invalid;
• Find forfeiture even without a conflicting claim by another water user; and
• Repose the burden of proof upon a water user to establish the validity of any claimed water right.

In short, SB 389 as initially introduced would have vitiated California’s longstanding riparian and pre-1914 water rights by placing the “determination” of those rights under the jurisdiction of the State Water Resources Control Board (SWRCB). Under existing law, often referred to as the “California Doctrine,” riparian and appropriative rights are recognized as determinative. Holders of them take precedence over all other claims.

Given its vitiation of 110 years of established California water law, SB 389 as first proposed incurred considerable opposition, most significantly from the politically influential Association of California Water Agencies (ACWA). ACWA’s opposition usually spells a bill’s defeat, but unlike AB 460 and AB 1337, which ran out of time to incorporate the amendments necessary to obviate that opposition, SB 389 was amended significantly before heading to the floor of both legislative houses.

As SB 389 now reads on the Governor’s desk, it authorizes the State Water Board to merely “investigate and ascertain” the validity of surface water rights as opposed to “determine” the validity of those rights. In addition, the amended bill now merely obligates the State Water Board to burden a water user as is reasonably needed to ascertain the information required to sustain a right, and it deletes a provision that would have statutorily imposed the burden of proof on any water right claimant.

Opposition from ACWA, various agricultural interests, and municipalities certainly contributed to the watering down of SB 389; however, watered down or not, it represents what we should assume is the first shot fired in what promises to be a long legislative tug of war to undo rights, privileges, and priorities long ensconced in California law in favor of arrangements better suited to a polity of 40 million souls coping with a warming, drying climate.

Golf doesn’t have much at stake in terms of holding riparian or pre-1914 water rights; however, it has much at stake in terms of reliance upon other longstanding water rights, laws, and policies sure to come under scrutiny once the ice is broken on SB 389 these next 30 days and a clear path paved for AB 460 and AB 1337 in 2024. Beyond that? No doubt more of the same.

One of the bills we watched carefully in 2023 for what it too might tell us about the future thrust of California water law was AB 1563 (Bennett; D-Ventura), a reprise of a bill Bennett authored in 2022 that would have made permanent the “verification” protocol in the Governor’s emergency executive order regarding groundwater extraction by prohibiting a county, city, or any other well permitting agency from approving a permit for a new groundwater well or for alteration of an existing well in a critically over drafted basin subject to SGMA unless a number of conditions are met beforehand. This would have made the Groundwater Sustainability Agency (GSA) the de facto permit authority for the sinking of new wells. Under current law it is generally a city or county that has the permitting authority, which has led to GSA’s interpreting their respective permitting authorities very differently, which in one case in Southern California led to a county permitting a well expansion only to be contradicted by a GSA that moved to nix the project after it had begun. Because AB 1563 foundered in the Senate, we can expect such conflicts and the uncertainty they pose to continue. But as with other water bills that didn’t quite make it this year (e.g., AB 460, AB 1337, AB 1573), it strikes us that the legislature will ultimately resolve the conflict in favor of the Groundwater Sustainability Agencies.

WHAT ELSE THE 2023 SESSION TOLD US

In 2022 a bill that would have proscribed the non-agricultural use of neonicotinoids by a date certain failed. In response, Assembly Member Rebecca Bauer-Kahan (D-Orinda) filed AB 363 in 2023, a bill not to ban all such use by a date certain, but to ban the sale for certain proscribed purposes upon a formal evaluation commencing January 2024 – a distinction with some very real differences. Golf argued in 2022 and again in 2023 that its licensed applicators were no different from the agricultural licensed applicators exempted from the proscription in the 2022 version as well as the initial 2023 version. The GCSAA led this campaign and stuck to it doggedly throughout the session and through some amendments applied in the Senate and concurred in by the author, secured the following in the final version of the bill as it now sits on Governor Newsom’s desk:

Beginning January 1, 2025, a person shall not sell, possess, or use a pesticide containing one or more neonicotinoid pesticides for any use that is excluded from the definition of “agricultural use” in Section 11408 on nonproduction outdoor ornamental plants, trees, or turf, with the exception of use and possession by state certified applicators and sale by state licensed pest control dealers.

What we referred to a few weeks ago as “labor’s roar” and others have taken to calling the “hot labor summer” only got louder and hotter as the legislative session closed. SB 799 (Portantino; D-Glendale), a “gut-and-amend” job that makes striking workers eligible to receive unemployment benefits after 14 days of striking, made it through both houses quickly and now sits on the desk of a Governor stuck between that rock and hard place known as visceral support from organized labor and visceral opposition from business organizations – all exacerbated by an EDD fund that is $18 billion in arrears.

Against a backdrop of an unprecedented United Auto Workers (UAW) strike of all three of the major American car manufacturers simultaneously, Kaiser Health workers authorizing a strike, and ongoing labor strife in the entertainment and other major industries, the legislature passed a bill to add to mandatory sick leave, a bill to raise to $20 the minimum wage of fast-food workers, a bill to raise to $25 the minimum wage for health care workers, and a bill to permit their own legislative staffers to unionize.

We’ll be watching to see which of these “hot labor” bills the Governor signs and which he vetoes. We’ll also be watching to see how new Assembly Speaker Rivas (D-Hollister) responds, given his past statements about wanting to seek a better balance between workers’ rights and job creation.

The Surplus Land Act continues to evolve in the direction of preferring affordable housing over open space/recreation when public agencies consider the disposition of their public lands. This year’s “evolution” was not as dramatic as previous years, but it’s just a matter of time before the preference becomes overwhelming. When added to increasingly onerous state mandated housing element protocols, it is fast becoming common to see cities and counties adding their municipally owned golf courses to the potentially developable properties within their limits listed therein. Laws that once golf and other park/recreation communities could reliably depend upon to ensure against development are fast weakening, making it just that much more important for golf and its leadership organizations to understand that it’s only to the degree to which residents of a community are prepared to see their local municipal golf courses as community assets that they are guaranteed to remain golf courses. Given that only 10% of the population plays golf, that is a heavy lift – not an insurmountable lift, but a heavy one requiring focused sustained effort. The SCGA understands this viscerally. We would love to be joined in that passion, particularly by some of the game’s national leadership organizations that seem to think the challenge to the municipal game can be met by the kindness of pro bono golf course architects and the generosity of country clubs on the Hill.

The success of Scott Wiener’s (D-San Francisco) SB 423 in the 2023 session over the opposition of numerous local governments and labor unions (Building Trades in particular) should tell golf just that much more about getting about making appeals to the 90% of the population that doesn’t play golf. SB 423 extends through 2036 the provisions of 2017’s SB 35 that enabled developments meeting certain affordable housing goals to secure the entitlements necessary to build by right as opposed to local discretion. It also reformed the aspect of SB 35 that most considered the greatest impediment to its success by changing a strict union labor requirement to a prevailing wage requirement; thus, some of the labor opposition.

From various directions the march toward obviating local control to build more housing, particularly housing in densely packed cities, poses obvious challenges to a recreational activity that requires significant acreage, which while it may in the aggregate not encumber more than other recreational activities, does indeed encumber it all in one place for the world to see, its detractors to highlight, and those bent on repurposing it to exploit for their own ends. An insurmountable challenge? Hardly, but one does have to make the effort to surmount it.

# # # # # # # # # # #

Golf & Water Networking Event at Metropolitan Water District re New Rebate/Incentive Programs

There is still time to register and join the Metropolitan Water District (MWD) and Los Angeles Water & Power (LADWP) to learn about funding from Metropolitan’s Water Savings Incentive Program (a “performance based” rebate program that extends beyond traditional turf rebates) and LADWP’s TAP Program.

What we referred to a few weeks ago as “labor’s roar” and others have taken to calling the “hot labor summer” only got louder and hotter as the legislative session closed. SB 799 (Portantino; D-Glendale), a “gut-and-amend” job that makes striking workers eligible to receive unemployment benefits after 14 days of striking, made it through both houses quickly and now sits on the desk of a Governor stuck between that rock and hard place known as visceral support from organized labor and visceral opposition from business organizations – all exacerbated by an EDD fund that is $18 billion in arrears.

Against a backdrop of an unprecedented United Auto Workers (UAW) strike of all three of the major American car manufacturers simultaneously, Kaiser Health workers authorizing a strike, and ongoing labor strife in the entertainment and other major industries, the legislature passed a bill to add to mandatory sick leave, a bill to raise to $20 the minimum wage of fast-food workers, a bill to raise to $25 the minimum wage for health care workers, and a bill to permit their own legislative staffers to unionize.

We’ll be watching to see which of these “hot labor” bills the Governor signs and which he vetoes. We’ll also be watching to see how new Assembly Speaker Rivas (D-Hollister) responds, given his past statements about wanting to seek a better balance between workers’ rights and job creation.

The Surplus Land Act continues to evolve in the direction of preferring affordable housing over open space/recreation when public agencies consider the disposition of their public lands. This year’s “evolution” was not as dramatic as previous years, but it’s just a matter of time before the preference becomes overwhelming. When added to increasingly onerous state mandated housing element protocols, it is fast becoming common to see cities and counties adding their municipally owned golf courses to the potentially developable properties within their limits listed therein. Laws that once golf and other park/recreation communities could reliably depend upon to ensure against development are fast weakening, making it just that much more important for golf and its leadership organizations to understand that it’s only to the degree to which residents of a community are prepared to see their local municipal golf courses as community assets that they are guaranteed to remain golf courses. Given that only 10% of the population plays golf, that is a heavy lift – not an insurmountable lift, but a heavy one requiring focused sustained effort. The SCGA understands this viscerally. We would love to be joined in that passion, particularly by some of the game’s national leadership organizations that seem to think the challenge to the municipal game can be met by the kindness of pro bono golf course architects and the generosity of country clubs on the Hill.

The success of Scott Wiener’s (D-San Francisco) SB 423 in the 2023 session over the opposition of numerous local governments and labor unions (Building Trades in particular) should tell golf just that much more about getting about making appeals to the 90% of the population that doesn’t play golf. SB 423 extends through 2036 the provisions of 2017’s SB 35 that enabled developments meeting certain affordable housing goals to secure the entitlements necessary to build by right as opposed to local discretion. It also reformed the aspect of SB 35 that most considered the greatest impediment to its success by changing a strict union labor requirement to a prevailing wage requirement; thus, some of the labor opposition.

From various directions the march toward obviating local control to build more housing, particularly housing in densely packed cities, poses obvious challenges to a recreational activity that requires significant acreage, which while it may in the aggregate not encumber more than other recreational activities, does indeed encumber it all in one place for the world to see, its detractors to highlight, and those bent on repurposing it to exploit for their own ends. An insurmountable challenge? Hardly, but one does have to make the effort to surmount it.

# # # # # # # # # # #

Golf & Water Networking Event at Metropolitan Water District re New Rebate/Incentive Programs

There is still time to register and join the Metropolitan Water District (MWD) and Los Angeles Water & Power (LADWP) to learn about funding from Metropolitan’s Water Savings Incentive Program (a “performance based” rebate program that extends beyond traditional turf rebates) and LADWP’s TAP Program.

What we referred to a few weeks ago as “labor’s roar” and others have taken to calling the “hot labor summer” only got louder and hotter as the legislative session closed. SB 799 (Portantino; D-Glendale), a “gut-and-amend” job that makes striking workers eligible to receive unemployment benefits after 14 days of striking, made it through both houses quickly and now sits on the desk of a Governor stuck between that rock and hard place known as visceral support from organized labor and visceral opposition from business organizations – all exacerbated by an EDD fund that is $18 billion in arrears.

Against a backdrop of an unprecedented United Auto Workers (UAW) strike of all three of the major American car manufacturers simultaneously, Kaiser Health workers authorizing a strike, and ongoing labor strife in the entertainment and other major industries, the legislature passed a bill to add to mandatory sick leave, a bill to raise to $20 the minimum wage of fast-food workers, a bill to raise to $25 the minimum wage for health care workers, and a bill to permit their own legislative staffers to unionize.

We’ll be watching to see which of these “hot labor” bills the Governor signs and which he vetoes. We’ll also be watching to see how new Assembly Speaker Rivas (D-Hollister) responds, given his past statements about wanting to seek a better balance between workers’ rights and job creation.

The Surplus Land Act continues to evolve in the direction of preferring affordable housing over open space/recreation when public agencies consider the disposition of their public lands. This year’s “evolution” was not as dramatic as previous years, but it’s just a matter of time before the preference becomes overwhelming. When added to increasingly onerous state mandated housing element protocols, it is fast becoming common to see cities and counties adding their municipally owned golf courses to the potentially developable properties within their limits listed therein. Laws that once golf and other park/recreation communities could reliably depend upon to ensure against development are fast weakening, making it just that much more important for golf and its leadership organizations to understand that it’s only to the degree to which residents of a community are prepared to see their local municipal golf courses as community assets that they are guaranteed to remain golf courses. Given that only 10% of the population plays golf, that is a heavy lift – not an insurmountable lift, but a heavy one requiring focused sustained effort. The SCGA understands this viscerally. We would love to be joined in that passion, particularly by some of the game’s national leadership organizations that seem to think the challenge to the municipal game can be met by the kindness of pro bono golf course architects and the generosity of country clubs on the Hill.

The success of Scott Wiener’s (D-San Francisco) SB 423 in the 2023 session over the opposition of numerous local governments and labor unions (Building Trades in particular) should tell golf just that much more about getting about making appeals to the 90% of the population that doesn’t play golf. SB 423 extends through 2036 the provisions of 2017’s SB 35 that enabled developments meeting certain affordable housing goals to secure the entitlements necessary to build by right as opposed to local discretion. It also reformed the aspect of SB 35 that most considered the greatest impediment to its success by changing a strict union labor requirement to a prevailing wage requirement; thus, some of the labor opposition.

From various directions the march toward obviating local control to build more housing, particularly housing in densely packed cities, poses obvious challenges to a recreational activity that requires significant acreage, which while it may in the aggregate not encumber more than other recreational activities, does indeed encumber it all in one place for the world to see, its detractors to highlight, and those bent on repurposing it to exploit for their own ends. An insurmountable challenge? Hardly, but one does have to make the effort to surmount it.

# # # # # # # # # # #

Golf & Water Networking Event at Metropolitan Water District re New Rebate/Incentive Programs

There is still time to register and join the Metropolitan Water District (MWD) and Los Angeles Water & Power (LADWP) to learn about funding from Metropolitan’s Water Savings Incentive Program (a “performance based” rebate program that extends beyond traditional turf rebates) and LADWP’s TAP Program.

When: Wednesday, September 20 @ 9:00 AM

Where: Metropolitan Water District at Union Station
Register: Networking Event at MWD – New Rebate/Incentive Programs

No fee Lunch provided Parking validated

When: Wednesday, September 20 @ 9:00 AM
Where: Metropolitan Water District at Union Station
Register: Networking Event at MWD – New Rebate/Incentive Programs

No fee Lunch provided Parking validated

The golf community has been meeting with MWD and communicating with LADWP about working together to craft rebate and/or incentive programs tailored to the specific needs of the golf courses beyond traditional turf removal. This networking event is an introduction to what both golf and MWD hope will be an extended dialog about figuring out more innovative and creative ways to keep reducing golf’s water footprint while continuing to meet the expectations of golfers.

Tuesday, September 5, 2023

Article provided by Craig Kessler, SCGA

As the legislature races to the finish of a session complicated by a budget deficit that cannot be known until the Franchise Tax Board receives Californians’ tax returns in mid-October, here is what we can report now about those bills the golf community has supported in the session, the bills the community has been tracking carefully, and one gut-and-amend job we have brought to your attention for what its fate may be able to inform us about the decibel level of what we have termed “labor’s roar” and others have called “labor’s hot summer.”

First, the two (2) bills the allied California golf community formally supported – AB 1572 (Friedman; D-Burbank) and AB 1573 (Friedman; D-Burbank). Both are headed to the Senate floor where their passage is all but certain.

To refresh your memories.

AB 1572 prohibits the use of potable water to irrigate nonfunctional turf on commercial, municipal, and institutional properties beginning in 2026.

Even before AB 1572 made it through its Assembly house of origin, the following language identifying “recreational” areas as functional turf and thus exempt from the bill’s proscriptions was added: “Recreational use area” means an area designated by a property owner or a governmental agency to accommodate human foot traffic for recreation, including, but not limited to, sports fields, golf courses, playgrounds, picnic grounds, or pet exercise areas. This recreation may be either formal or informal.

In its travel through the Senate AB 1572 was further amended to buttress local over state control and to use the California Water Efficiency Partnerships definition of functional and nonfunctional turf, which rather than using two generic categories of turf, employs three categories, functional, recreational, and ornamental, reinforcing further golf’s longstanding status as “functional/recreational” turf for the purposes of this and other proscriptions under California law.

AB 1572 and its companion AB 1573 [prohibition of nonfunctional turf in new or renovated commercial/industrial areas] (Friedman; D-Burbank) contain language making clear that “golf” is part of the “functional” and “non-ornamental” classes of turf exempt from the proscription, and the second of the bills (AB 1573) specifically enshrines that language in a Model Water Landscape Ordinance (MWELO) with a 1.0 plant factor for turf that shall henceforth be the mandatory minimum default position of every planning agency in the state.

To the degree to which so much of the sausage making involved in crafting legislation is cutting and pasting extant language into future language, these categorizations become the default language, the starting point as it were. Anyone familiar with the damage done to the national golf community by language inserted in a 1977 IRS regulation placing golf on a “sin list” of businesses ineligible for federal disaster relief can understand the significance of this. And we trust you understand the importance of golf overtly supporting these two bills.

With respect to the most significant of the bills golf tracked closely in the session – SB 389 (Allen; D-Redondo Beach) and tracked for what it portends for what we anticipate are likely to be future erosions in longstanding water rights many have long considered sacred, here is where that bill stands.

But first, another refresher.

As originally introduced in February, SB 389 proposed the addition of a new article to the Water Code authorizing the State Water Board to:

• Investigate a diversion and use of water from a stream system to determine whether the diversion and use are based upon a valid right;
• Issue an information order to a water user to provide technical reports or other information related to the diversion;
• Issue a decision or order that determines the water right, whether limited in scope or wholly invalid;
• Find forfeiture even without a conflicting claim by another water user; and
• Repose the burden of proof upon a water user to establish the validity of any claimed water right.

In short, SB 389 as initially introduced would have vitiated California’s longstanding Riparian and pre-1914 water rights by placing the “determination” of those rights under the jurisdiction of the State Water Resources Control Board (SWRCB). Under existing law, often referred to as the “California Doctrine,” riparian and appropriative rights are recognized as determinative. Holders thereof take precedence over all other claims.

A bit of background to place the significance of this legislation in context.

Riparian rights are attached to land that is contiguous to a river, stream, or other natural water course. They permit a landowner to put the water to beneficial use on their land. Riparian rights derive from English common law, which the California Legislature adopted upon becoming an American state in 1850.

The doctrine of prior appropriation (also known as “first in time, first in right”) applies to appropriative rights and is a seniority system that still applies today. Under prior appropriation, a junior water right holder (i.e., one that claimed a right at a date after a senior water right claimant) has his/her right curtailed, or cut back, in times of shortage before the next claimant has his/her right curtailed. Like riparian rights, appropriative rights were recognized in the 19th Century, albeit a few years after California entered the Union by virtue of an 1855 California Supreme Court decision that was codified by an act of the legislature in 1872.

It wasn’t until 1913 that California established a more comprehensive and trackable framework for managing water rights with the creation of a state Water Commission accorded sole jurisdiction to determine rights to unappropriated surface waters. The Act that created the Water Commission recognized that water rights obtained prior to its passage were still valid. The Water Commission later became the State Water Resources Control Board.

Given its vitiation of 110 years of established California water law, SB 389 as first proposed incurred considerable opposition, most significantly from the politically influential Association of California Water Agencies (ACWA), which likely explains that as it now stands, it has been amended to make it more about the acquisition of information than the enablement of state action.

The version passed by the Senate was significantly amended prior to passage, and the version that passed through Water, Parks and Wildlife in the Assembly was amended more so. As it now reads, SB 389 authorizes the State Water Board to merely “investigate and ascertain” the validity of surface water rights as opposed to “determine” the validity of those rights. In addition, the amended bill now merely obligates the State Water Board to burden a water user as is reasonably needed to ascertain the information required to sustain a right, and it deletes a provision that would have statutorily imposed the burden of proof on any water right claimant.

Opposition from ACWA, various agricultural interests, and municipalities certainly contributed to the watering down of SB 389; however, watered down or not, should it make through Appropriations and the floor and be signed by Governor Newsom, we believe it presages a cascade of rights-reversing water legislation in 2024 and beyond. And that is where it now stands – before Assembly Appropriations, where if it isn’t held in suspense, will likely pass a floor vote, be enrolled, and sent to the Governor for signature or veto. And unlike AB’s 1572 and 1573, which are highly unlikely to be vetoed, this one could be.

We’ll soon know. And with that knowledge we’ll have a greater sense of two other bills of similar consequence that are being carried forward by their authors to January as 2-year bills – AB 460 (Bauer-Kahan; D-Orinda) that would authorize the State Water Board to issue “interim relief” orders to enforce the reasonable use doctrine and water rights, and AB 1337 (Wicks; D-Oakland) that would authorize the State Water Board to issue curtailment orders for any diversion, even pre-1914 appropriative rights. If SB 389 becomes law, expect these two bills to follow suit, although both would likely be amended considerably before becoming so.

As for the “gut-and-amend” effort we predicted in an earlier Update, SB 799 (Portantino; D-Glendale) that would follow suit in part with New York and New Jersey in providing unemployment benefits to striking workers is in committee, suffice it say that this one is hotly contested. How that contest turns out by end of session at midnight September 14 should tell us just how loud what we earlier termed “labor’s roar” is this summer.

The formal arguments in both support and opposition are predictable. From the legislative analysis:

Arguments in Support. The California Labor Federation, the sponsor of this bill, writes in support on behalf of a coalition of labor groups: “As long as striking workers are ineligible for UI benefits (unemployment benefits), the State is giving employers a weapon against the interests of workers, their families, and communities. The prohibition on striking workers receiving UI enables employers to wait out a strike, hoping that the precarious financial situation of their workers, many of whom will face inability to stay in their homes, loss of health care, and strangling debt, will lead to a swifter end to the strike.”

Arguments in Opposition. The California Chamber of Commerce has labeled this bill a “job killer.” In opposition the Cal Chamber and other employer organizations write: “Striking workers have a job – they are just choosing not to work in order to create economic pressure and negotiate. That is not the same as having no idea where your next paycheck comes from. SB 799 is a profound departure from UI’s history, and a significant tax increase on California’s employers, including those who have no involvement in any labor disputes. Moreover, with a recession potentially in our future, SB 799 risks compounding UI’s insolvency – which will weigh heavily on the State, California’s employers, and California’s truly unemployed.”

Also from the legislative analysis is a “suggested amendment” that in our opinion opens a wide berth for predicating opposition on a factor outside the scope of both “arguments:”

Suggested Amendments. Should this measure move forward, the author may wish to consider a delayed implementation date until the UI Trust Fund is no longer suffering a deficit or, at the very least, until the new IT system EDD Next is complete in Fiscal Year 2026-27.

On the other hand, just last week the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) issued a ruling that allows for the Board to bypass an election and go straight to bargaining in situations where employers are found to have committed serious labor law violations in combatting employees’ efforts to organize a bargaining unit. Previously, the only remedy was to require an election or a do-over election. The “roar” isn’t just a California thing.

For those with huge appetites for detail, here are links to AB 1572 & AB 1573 as they are headed to the Senate floor, SB 389 as it stands going to Assembly Appropriations, and SB 799 as it courses through committees.

AB 1572
AB 1573
SB 389

SB 799

As of today (September 6), there are 948 “active measures” before the Assembly and Senate. With only 8 days to go in the session, things promise to be fast and furious in the Capitol.

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There have been some recent developments of national impact of which many of you policy wonks may be aware – the posting of a Waters of the United States (WOTUS) Rule revised to reflect the US Supreme Court’s decision in Sackett, a revision that substantially reduces the scope of federal jurisdiction over certain kinds of waters, and the publication of an overtime threshold rule that would raise today’s national threshold from $35K per year to roughly $55K per year. The former only tangentially affects California. The latter does not affect California at all. Given that, we’ll report about both later, as much to again explain why so much of what affects most states when the federal government issues regulations and legislation does not affect California as to explain the tangential impact of the new WOTUS Rule.

Monday, August 14, 2023

Article provided by Craig Kessler, SCGA

Anyone over a certain age, and even those below a certain age, know something of Yogi Berra’s caveat about predictions – “predictions are a dangerous thing, particularly about the future.”

But if one accepts the wisdom contained in Edmund Burke’s dictum about “society being a partnership of the living, the dead, and the unborn,” predictions are less stabs in the dark than extrapolations drawn from the trajectory of current events.

If you are a regular reader of these “Updates,” you know that we have been doing a lot of the second variety of predicting in recent months – from what the aridification of the Colorado Basin portends, to the what changing weather patterns in the Sierra Nevada mean, to what bills floating in Sacramento vitiating long sacred water rights contemplate, to what the state’s acute housing shortage threatens for a game that requires large tracts of land, to what competition for precious park and green space means for a sector long characterized elite and aloof, all the way down to what a certain editorial in the Southern California News Group advocating for the resurrection of AB 1910 suggests in terms of financially interested parties taking another run at 22.3% of California’s golf stock.

To this lengthy list of challenges, allow us to “predict” one more. Labor – not so much in terms of cost, but in terms of political and social consequence.

Economists don’t agree on much, but they do agree that worker compensation as a percentage of economic productivity has declined since the federal minimum wage’s high-water mark in 1968. Some find the decline higher than others. Such is the nature of economic modeling. But assessing the validity of economic models is above our pay grade – way above. So, we’ll go with the common ground contained within them.

Wages represented a smaller share of the overall economy in 2008 than they did in 1968, although with wide variances. Such is the nature of averages. To throw in yet another aphorism (rule of three?), one must always remember that a 6-foot person can drown in a river the average depth of which is 4 feet, depending upon where he or she is standing in the river. Exactly where golf stands in that river is, again, above our pay grade, but we suspect that most reading this understand that golf was not an exception to the trends that animated the 1968-2008 aggregate decline, not in all job categories but more than enough of them to put golf operations firmly in the category of those sectors that benefitted from relatively stable labor costs.

We won’t regale you with the obvious. We’ll just note that coming out of COVID, wage floors of almost all kinds increased dramatically, whether the minimum wage that is the de jure bottom of every floor or the de facto floor represented by what it takes to fill a specific job. Golf jobs are for the most part well above such floors, but when the floor rises, everything above it goes up to some degree. Labor costs may not have gone up as dramatically as the water, compliance, material, and capital project costs endemic to the industry, but when all costs are ascendant in a sector dependent upon securing discretionary dollars from willing purchasers, there is downward pressure on the pool of purchasers. Of course, “downward pressure” isn’t a consignment to failure; it just makes success harder to achieve.

We will regale you with what you may not find obvious. Labor’s larger share of the economic pie isn’t just some COVID driven anomaly that may reverse course in much the same way golf expects some of golf’s incredible COVID bump to ease. It’s here to stay. We don’t draw that conclusion because we can predict the future. We draw it because we can predict the present.

And predicting the future requires nothing more than taking stock of a few “present” facts.

In May Senator Tom Umberg (D-Santa Ana) introduced an initiative that if it is able to secure two-thirds approval from both Senate and Assembly in the next 30 days would place on the November 2024 ballot an initiative that would enshrine in the state constitution the right to organize and negotiate with employers, including governmental employers, while invalidating laws and ordinances that violate those rights.

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors is poised to consider a motion by Janice Hahn (seconded by Supervisor Horvath) to direct County Staff to draft a “Tourism Worker Retention Minimum Wage Ordinance” that would require hotels that serve 60 or more guests and theme parks in unincorporated areas to be paid at least $25 an hour, rising to $30 an hour by 2028, when the Summer Olympics will be held in Los Angeles. The ordinance envisaged by Hahn’s motion parallels recent motions in Los Angeles City and Long Beach, confirming what we have come to understand about how what one large Southern California municipality does is soon echoed by others.

The Los Angeles Times attributed the following to Supervisor Hahn in last Thursday’s edition: “Too many employers are paying their workers low wages, which exacerbates poverty, homelessness, and housing insecurity. At the same time, hoteliers benefit from county investments in beaches and parks, attracting tourists to the region, and theme parks benefit from special zoning privileges, giving the county a vested interest in how their workers are paid.” The parallels to the 20 golf courses Los Angeles County leases to private operators are too close to ignore.

First reported by Politico and subsequently confirmed by multiple media outlets, a bill carried by Senate Appropriations Chair Anthony Portantino (D-Glendale) and co-authored by Assembly Member Laura Friedman (D-Burbank) and Assembly Appropriations Chair Chris Holden (D-Pasadena) will be drafted the last 30 days of the 2023 legislative session that would allow striking workers to receive unemployment benefits. Nothing of this sort has ever been part of California law, although New York and New Jersey do permit unemployment benefits for certain workers under certain circumstances. The details of the California version are not yet known, because nothing is yet in print. For those of you who may be asking, how can a bill that has never been in print, never been heard by a policy committee, and never been placed on the floor of either house of the legislature be drafted and rushed through to the Governor’s desk as this stage of the session, please now be viscerally educated as to what the “gut and amend” process is all about. A legislator need only strip all contents from a bill alive and well in the late stages of the process and replace those contents in whole with new and often completely unrelated language. No doubt, that final language will be the language the co-authors deem most likely to secure sufficient support within a Democratic Caucus that while always strongly pro-labor, was sufficiently attuned to business interests to nix an identical bill floated by AB 5 author Lorena Gonzalez (D-San Diego) in 2019. A failed 2019 effort that succeeds as a gut and amend job in 2023 would certainly tell us something significant about just how much things have changed post COVID.

These most recent “events” come on the heels of spikes in general minimum wages for all and differential minimum wages for specific sectors, e.g., hotels. Throw in a “great resignation,” record low unemployment rates, renewed inflation rates, and the fact that since the days of Miguel Contreras, Los Angeles has become the nation’s center of organizing activity, and the following “facts” shouldn’t surprise: 1) So far this year there have been 53 labor strikes in California involving 276,340 participants, 2) in 2022, there were 96 strikes with 92,527 participants, and 3) in 2021 there were 52 strikes with 64,849 participants [Source: Cornell University’s Labor Action Tracker, courtesy of the LA Times.]. All this, not to mention that 11,000 City of Los Angeles workers participated in a one-day work stoppage last week and Unite Here Local 11 continues to perform rolling strikes at the region’s hotels.

In past times these kinds of disruptions might have stimulated public antipathy. From what we know from all credible polling and reporting, the opposite is the case now. The last time Hollywood went on strike, the public had little sympathy. Today’s SAG/AFTRA and Writers Guild strike, the first time in 63 years that both have struck at the same time, has generated considerably more public support for the strikers than their studio employers. We are also informed by those same polls and media accounts that there is more coordination and cooperation than in past times among sectors like hotel workers and screenwriters that occupy vastly different economic niches.

Let’s not forget the populism that suffuses our current politics. Right leaning populism may be the much stronger of the two at the moment (it almost always has been in American history, and it is dominant right now in one of America’s political parties), but the left leaning version of it has a significant presence as well. Anything that smacks of elitism, exclusivity, dare we suggest “country club,” or the following caricature of golf we like to repeat to rattle golf’s all too often complacent cages carries the risk of running head on into both variants: Golf – too much land that uses too much water to serve the interests of the too few who have had too much for too long.

Those with great memories will remember that at the beginning of this essay we suggested that Labor’s roar, while certainly a business consideration of some consequence, was much more a consideration of political and social consequence. Golf has proven eminently capable of managing rising costs of all stripes, many of them more substantial than current labor accommodations. Golf will prove capable yet again; of this we have absolute confidence. What we do worry about, and you may have guessed by now why we penned this essay, is golf’s ability to frame everything it says and more importantly, does, in a way that aligns with the spirit of the times, or at least doesn’t overtly conflict with it and in the process, put golf squarely in the crosshairs of an irate public. An irate public gives birth to bad outcomes in the public arena.

To be fair, as well as fully accurate, golf has proven capable of crafting a fact-based narrative that places the game firmly in alignment with the environmental and conservation ethic that characterizes the spirit (and letter) of the times. And golf is proving increasingly capable of crafting a fact-based narrative that highlights the added social value/utility golf courses offer the communities in which they are located – a rapidly evolving work in progress. But the game also needs to begin working to come to terms and then align with a demonstrable tilt in favor of workers over their managers and labor over capital. Excuse the gross simplification, but we didn’t want to confuse what is really a quite simple point by cluttering it up with complication.

Securing best available outcomes in the public arena is an exercise in identifying one’s audience and speaking in a language best calculated to appeal to it.

Thursday, July 27, 2023

Article provided by Craig Kessler, SCGA

The Legislature is on summer vacation. The members return August 14 and adjourn for the year 31 days later on September 14. Bills that pass through both houses by that date move to the Governor for signature or veto. Before they go to their respective floors for final votes, bills must first get through the two Appropriations Committees, the places where controversial bills often find their final resting places.

One very “controversial” bill, SB 389 (Allen; D-Redondo Beach), is one that we have been watching since it was filed early in the session, watching along with two companion bills, AB 460 (Bauer-Kahan; D-Orinda) and AB 1337 (Wicks; D-Oakland) that rise to the same level of “controversy” to the degree to which they too represent challenges to water rights that have been sacrosanct for more than a century.

As originally introduced in February, SB 389 proposed the addition of a new article to the Water Code authorizing the State Water Board to:Investigate a diversion and use of water from a stream system to determine whether the diversion and use are based upon a valid right;Issue an information order to a water user to provide technical reports or other information related to the diversion;Issue a decision or order that determines the water right, whether limited in scope or wholly invalid;Find forfeiture even without a conflicting claim by another water user; andRepose the burden of proof upon a water user to establish the validity of any claimed water right.

In short, SB 389 as initially introduced would have vitiated California’s longstanding Riparian and pre-1914 water rights by placing the “determination” of those rights under the jurisdiction of the State Water Resources Control Board (SWRCB). Under existing law, often referred to as the “California Doctrine,” riparian and appropriative rights are recognized as determinative. Holders thereof take precedence over all other claims.

A bit of background to place the significance of this legislation in context.

Riparian rights are attached to land that is contiguous to a river, stream, or other natural water course. They permit a landowner to put the water to beneficial use on their land. Riparian rights derive from English common law, which the California Legislature adopted upon becoming an American state in 1850.

The doctrine of prior appropriation (also known as “first in time, first in right”) applies to appropriative rights and is a seniority system that still applies today. Under prior appropriation, a junior water right holder (i.e., one that claimed a right at a date after a senior water right claimant) has his/her right curtailed, or cut back, in times of shortage before the next claimant has his/her right curtailed. Like riparian rights, appropriative rights were recognized in the 19th Century, albeit a few years after California entered the Union by virtue of an 1855 California Supreme Court decision that was codified by an act of the legislature in 1872.

It wasn’t until 1913 that California established a more comprehensive and trackable framework for managing water rights with the creation of a state Water Commission accorded sole jurisdiction to determine rights to unappropriated surface waters. The Act that created the Water Commission recognized that water rights obtained prior to its passage were still valid. The Water Commission later became the State Water Resources Control Board.

Given its vitiation of 110 years of established California water law, SB 389 as first proposed incurred considerable opposition, most significantly from the politically influential Association of California Water Agencies (ACWA). As we suggested earlier this year when we first brought this bill and AB 460 to your attention, ACWA’s opposition usually spells a bill’s defeat, and to the degree to which SB 389 and AB 460 might offer exceptions to that general rule would represent the degree to which we could be on the cusp of a protracted period of radical changes to California water law.

SB 389 is very much alive as we await the return of the legislators from their summer hiatuses. It has passed through the floor of the Senate and is now in the Assembly, where it has passed through the Committee on Water, Parks, and Wildlife and moved forward to Chris Holden’s (D-Pasadena) Appropriations Committee. Should it make it through Appropriations, it moves to the floor, where passage would then be all but guaranteed.

But there is a rub. The version passed by the Senate was significantly amended prior to passage, and the version that passed through Water, Parks and Wildlife in the Assembly was amended more so. As it now reads, SB 389 authorizes the State Water Board to merely “investigate and ascertain” the validity of surface water rights as opposed to “determine” the validity of those rights. In addition, the amended bill now merely obligates the State Water Board to burden a water user as is reasonably needed to ascertain the information required to sustain a right, and it deletes a provision that would have statutorily imposed the burden of proof on any water right claimant.

Opposition from ACWA, various agricultural interests, and municipalities certainly contributed to the watering down of SB 389; however, watered down or not, should it make through Appropriations and the floor and be signed by Governor Newsom, we believe it presages a cascade of rights-reversing water legislation in 2024 and beyond.

Those “companion” bills, AB 460 that would authorize the State Water Board to issue “interim relief” orders to enforce the reasonable use doctrine and water rights, and AB 1337 that would authorize the State Water Board to issue curtailment orders for any diversion, even pre-1914 appropriative rights, are dead for 2023, having been pulled from their committees of reference prior to the summer recess but remain alive as 2-year bills come January 2024. Getting even that far tells us something about where California is headed in terms of erosions in longstanding water rights and expectations.

There is one bill that we started the session “watching” and to a small degree worrying about – AB 1572 (Friedman; D-Burbank), a bill that prohibits the use of potable water to irrigate nonfunctional turf on commercial, municipal, institutional, and multifamily residential properties beginning in 2026. Watching and worrying not because of its plain language distinguishing functional from non-functional turf, but rather because of the propensity of certain environmental organizations and certain media outlets to identify the turf on golf courses as non-functional even though California law makes clear the opposite.

Even before AB 1572 made it through its Assembly house of origin, the following language identifying “recreational” areas as functional turf and thus exempt from the bill’s proscriptions was added:

“Recreational use area” means an area designated by a property owner or a governmental agency to accommodate human foot traffic for recreation, including, but not limited to, sports fields, golf courses, playgrounds, picnic grounds, or pet exercise areas. This recreation may be either formal or informal.

In its travel through the Senate AB 1572 was further amended to buttress local over state control and to use the California Water Efficiency Partnerships definition of functional and nonfunctional turf, which rather than using two generic categories of turf, employs three categories, functional, recreational, and ornamental, reinforcing further golf’s longstanding status as “functional/recreational” turf for the purposes of this and other proscriptions under California law.

AB 1572, along with its companion AB 1573 [prohibition of nonfunctional turf in new or renovated commercial/industrial areas] (Friedman; D-Burbank) that also contains the same “recreational use area” language that makes clear golf’s inclusion therein, are now so clear about golf’s place in the functional/recreational turf universe that the California Alliance for Golf (CAG) has filed formal letters of support for both bills with the Senate Appropriations Committee.

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We wish we had more to report regarding the appearance of that Southern California News Group July 5 editorial advocating the resurrection of AB 1910, but we know no more today than we did then other than the fact that its appearance should be construed by every golf organization, golf company, golf club, and golf interest in the state as presaging the return of something akin to 1910 in the next session. We have been forewarned.

There are two interregnums in play right now – the lull before the Legislature returns to finish its 2023 work and the lull before the 2024 session commences and with it perhaps another bout with a “Public Golf Endangerment Act.”

Article provided by Craig Kessler, SCGA

June 20, 2023

An op-ed in the Los Angeles Times during US Open week captured the attention of the golf and non-golf worlds. Its title: “The PGA Tour-LIV Golf merger isn’t the problem; Golf is.” Its author: A law professor from the Midwest whose magnum opus on golf is a law review article that posits the notion that mere reform of the game isn’t enough; only “abolition” will do. No doubt the good law professor understands what the term, “abolition,” conjures up in the American imagination.

If you missed it, you can access it by clicking here. If upon reading the rest of this Update you would like to discuss further, please reach out to either Craig Kessler or Kevin Fitzgerald. We would welcome the conversation.

Much of the anti-golf screed repeats conclusions about golf’s use of water and non-organics that are as false as they are incendiary. The same goes for repetition of the arguments that the backers of last year’s AB 1910 issued to single golf and only golf out for the receipt of public subsidies to repurpose courses as housing tracts. So too, the dredging up of some of golf’s exclusionary past, as if golf doesn’t have a lot of company in that respect and hasn’t spent the last 60 years remediating it.

But there was one aspect of the op-ed that may have caught you by surprise – the notion that private golf clubs get “special tax breaks” in the form of a tax valuation basis that insulates them from paying what in the author’s opinion is their “fair share,” with the gap between what they remit under settled California law and what the author believes they ought to remit representing a “subsidy.”

The law professor is certainly entitled to his opinion, and the Los Angeles Times is certainly entitled to run that opinion on its Opinion Page.

But there is more than mere “opinion” that one needs to know in order to gain a full understanding of the matter – things like the law on the subject, the history of that law, the sound public policies and public goods that support that law and history, and the undesirable consequences of jettisoning both to satisfy a populist rant.

What follows is some law, some history, some public policy, and some political/social reality to put last week’s op-ed in perspective. Okay – a little “opinion” too. We too are entitled to an opinion.

BACKGROUND

In 1960 California’s voters approved Proposition 6. Its title: “Assessment of Golf Courses.” The initiative set a basis for determining the taxes to be paid by private non-profit golf clubs [501 (c)(7) corporations] that remains in effect to this day and is enshrined in ARTICLE XIII, Section 10 of the California Constitution as follows:

Real property in a parcel of 10 or more acres which, on the lien date and for 2 or more years immediately preceding, has been used exclusively for nonprofit golf course purposes shall be assessed for taxation on the basis of such use, plus any value attributable to mines, quarries, hydrocarbon substances, or other minerals in the property or the right to extract hydrocarbons or other minerals from the property. [ARTICLE XIII, Section 10]

Over the course of 63 years of interpretation by county assessors and boards of equalization, the standard enunciated in this initiative has resulted in tax bills calculated to incent golf clubs to remain what the initiative’s proponents referred in their formal ballot argument as “privately paid-for parks.” Most of the state’s cities, including the City of Los Angeles, zone their private golf clubs “open space” in deference to the Constitutional provision, or as the ballot argument put forth by Proposition 6’s backers much more boldly stated the matter in their introductory remarks:

How would you like the golf courses nearest your home to be converted into noisy factory layouts, clamorous supermarkets, traffic jammed shopping centers or brick and mortar apartment units? Proposition 6 is designed to save these courses and their benefits to you and your family as wooded, planted open space areas giving green belt breathing space to California’s growing cities.

That ballot argument was co-authored by one of Proposition 6’s biggest political backers, Augustus Hawkins, who the historians and political junkies among you will remember as one of the 20th Century’s most prominent Democratic legislators (28 years in the California Assembly and 28 years in the U.S. House of Representatives). While a subject for another day, golf really does need to come to terms with its complete reversal of fortune in terms of the strong support it once had from the left side of the political aisle. Gus Hawkins, co-founder of the Congressional Black Caucus, represented inner city Los Angeles in the House from 1962-1990 and vigorously pushed this initiative to, as he wrote, prevent California’s “privately paid-for parks,” as he defined country clubs, from “being taxed out of existence and taxed into overbuilt industrial and commercial developments.”

The arguments in favor of 1960’s Proposition 6 are worth reexamining in light of last week’s screed in the Opinion Section of the Los Angeles Times, which was but the latest salvo from those who like this author are really about “abolishing” the game, something even Malcolm Gladwell in his rant “A Good Walk Spoiled” didn’t suggest, although he did subtitle his viral podcast, “why I hate golf and you should too.”

Anything worth reexamining is worth repeating. So, here are a few of Proposition 6’s pro arguments excerpted from that 1960 ballot:

TAX REVENUE LOSS DUE TO DEPRECIATING VALUE OF SURROUNDING LAND WILL BE AVOIDED

Residential areas surrounding courses pay higher taxes because of scenic charm and prestige. Unfair taxes on the courses, forcing them to sell out and convert into commercial use, drops the value of the residential areas surrounding, erodes the tax base and throws a heavier tax burden on remaining taxpayers.

PROPOSITION 6 WILL HELP PROTECT OUR TOURIST AND CONVENTION INDUSTRY

These courses are a leading tourist and convention attraction. Tourists bring more than $1 billion in new outside money yearly into California. This means jobs for thousands. Fair taxation under Proposition 6 will help protect a major facility sustaining this source of employment.

TAX PRESSURE HURTS THE THOUSANDS WHO SEEK RECREATION ON PUBLIC LINKS

Courses cut down by the “tax ax” throw their membership into the public links, adding to the already great pressure there. Thus, thousands who cannot afford to belong to private golf clubs will be victimized.

OUR CITIES NEED OPEN AREAS AND “GREEN BELTS”

Civilian defense authorities say golf courses are indispensable facilities for use as mobilization areas in case of emergency. Parks and planted areas operated at private cost contribute to the beauty, health, and appeal of our growing metropolitan areas. Planted areas help decontaminate the air because plants absorb carbon dioxide and give off oxygen; thus, combatting air pollution.

TAKEAWAYS

Sixty-three (63) years later the arguments remain valid, although in 2023 we would need to predicate the value of golf courses as mobilization areas not for “civilian defense,” but rather firefighting. If anything, the relationship between maintenance of private equity clubs and public links access, and its companion affordability, is a much more visceral relationship today than it was in 1960.

There are only two types of golf courses in the City of Los Angeles today – tony private clubs and municipal golf courses. The in-between – the daily fee course – which did exist in large numbers in 1960, are today gone, their once permeable surfaces that provided open spaces, heat sinks, and active recreation now covered in high rise buildings, shopping centers, hotels, and residential communities. It was not the result of some conspiracy or anti-golf animus, merely the workings of market capitalism.

Taken together, the public policy/public good arguments that sold Proposition 6 to California’s electorate in 1960 could have been summed up then as it can even much more so be summed up now – TAX SOMETHING AT HIGHEST AND BEST USE AND HIGHEST AND BEST USE IS WHAT YOU WILL GET – and that’s not what often makes for what those who live in Los Angeles and other urbanized California communities consider a high quality life. It’s why that city has used public funds to take 155,000 acres of land in its Santa Monica Mountains permanently out of circulation for anything other than open space. Dare we suggest that there are far more opportunity costs and tax losses involved in that act of market capitalism forbearance than the forbearance required to allow for not just private golf recreation, but privately held recreation of all types. Dare we also suggest to those enamored of using public subsidies to repurpose publicly held golf courses for commercial purposes that taken together all of California’s golf courses represent less acreage – 144,000 acres to be exact.

LOOKING FORWARD

There are two (2) sides to the story told in last week’s Los Angeles Times. If the only persons telling the story are those like the author of the hit op-ed piece who openly makes a case that golf just needs to be “abolished,” that will end up being the only side that the general public hears. And that will be the side that frames a debate thereon should 2/3 of each House of the California legislature find that the matter should be put to the voters again in the 2020’s.

What appeared in last week’s Los Angeles Times was not the least bit surprising. Indeed, we predicted such one year ago – not only that the issue would be joined when the US Open graced the fairways of Los Angeles for the 1st time in 75 years, but that the issue would be joined in the form of an op-ed in the LA Times. The stage was simply too well set for those who have long aimed at gaining support for singling golf out among other open/green space activities for conversion to commercial purposes.

Golf has a tough call to make. Was last week just a one-time blip in a longstanding crusade by a decidedly minority view that will escape back into silence now that the 2023 US Open is in the record books? Or does it portend more to come? More AB 1910’s, more municipal conversions, and more populist screeds against the very notion of private clubs in urban areas. Overreaction to a negligible threat can provide it with oxygen otherwise unattainable. On the other hand, underreaction to a real threat can put one too far behind to respond effectively. We did say this was a “tough call.”

Article provided by Craig Kessler, SCGA

June 6, 2023

Last Friday was the last day of the 2023 session for bills to pass their houses of origin and move to the other house for consideration. Those bills that did make it over now go through the same policy committee, appropriations, and floor vote processes that if similarly successful and subsequently passed in identical form, get moved to the Governor for signature or veto. That has to happen by midnight September 14, or those bills too are dead for 2023.

As we have been reporting since the beginning of the 2023 session, there are six (6) broad categories we have been tracking and in a few cases taking action upon: 1) Significant changes to the Surplus Land Act; 2) state usurpations of local land use control; 3) compression of CEQA (California Environmental Quality Act) and other permitting processes/protocols (e.g., zoning); 4) all things water; 5) additional regulatory controls on equipment and/or non-organic inputs; and 6) anything resembling the two municipal golf bills that dominated our attentions the previous two sessions (AB 672 & AB 1910).
Tracking/Watching

With respect to that last broad category, we are happy to report that nothing approximating the two bills we tagged “Public Golf Endangerment Acts” the last two sessions has been on anybody’s radar screen in the Capitol, a testament in part to the way in which the California golf community was able during those two campaigns to trumpet the social/environmental value proposition represented by golf courses in the California communities in which they are located – a value for golfers and non-golfers alike.

With respect to the ongoing slide of open space/recreation’s priority over housing in the Surplus Land Act, this year was much less active than the last four sessions. With respect to further state usurpations of local land use control, the same – less activity than previous sessions. Both may have something to do with the fact that there was so much activity 2019-2022. We track these not so much because they directly affect golf, but because anything that affects the processes employed to determine the use and/or reuse of land can impinge upon a sector that encumbers the kind of acreage golf uses.

With respect to compression of CEQA and other permitting protocols, the action in this legislative session comes mostly from the Governor. Newsom has proposed that the legislature adopt compressed timeframes for the operation of CEQA (California Environmental Quality Act), particularly with respect to the time allowed for the disposition of lawsuits challenging the adequacy of the Environmental Impact Reports that are central thereto. The Governor has proposed that these regulatory shortcuts be adopted as budget trailer bills, which means that their particulars will not be vetted through the same dilatory processes that the bills that passed their houses Friday are having to endure. They’ll be hatched out of public sight, likely by each house’s respective leaderships. Because CEQA is so jealously protected by an environmental community that is a substantial component of this state’s Democratic majority, many believe the legislature just might be too busy with closing the $32 billion and growing budget deficit and those bills that did go through the normal legislative order to take up the Governor’s request.

Why do we “track/watch” CEQA and other land use permitting reforms? The same reason we track/watch housing’s ascendancy over open space/parks/recreation in the Surplus Land Act and fast tracking of zoning and other land use processes – because local communities are always the bulwark against the repurposing of golf courses for higher and better economic purposes or purposes that a distant central government finds a more important interest in the collective than a local community finds in the specific. It makes no sense for golf to get involved in these kinds of bills. It would cause more harm than good for a myriad of reasons that we’ll leave for another discussion another day. But getting a sense of where these trends are headed is of immense value to a sector that needs lead time to incorporate these trends into its long-term business and strategic planning.

While golf did take action on some water bills (see below), on others we tracked/watched and for the same reason we tracked the other bills in this opening discussion – golf has neither the visceral interest nor the bandwidth to affect their fate but does have a keen interest in learning where things might be headed with respect to longstanding water rights and arrangements that golf takes for granted at great peril.

Three (3) water bills fit that description. First, their particulars, followed by their much longer-term implications.

• AB 1337 (Wicks; D-Oakland) – would give the State Water Control Board (SWRCB) definitive authority to issue curtailment orders for all water diverters, including holders of senior rights. Rationale for need to provide that definitive authority: An appellate decision that found that SWRCB did not have the authority to order holders of senior rights cuts.
• SB 389 (Allen; D-Santa Monica) – would clarify the state’s authority to investigate and verify whether the claims of senior rights holders are valid and if valid, accurate.
• AB 460 (Bauer-Kahan; D-Orinda) – would give SWRCB the authority to issue temporary orders to cease what it determines are “unlawful takings of water,” and would increase fines for violations up to $10K per day plus $2.5K per acre-foot of water diverted. Rationale: The existing fine schedule has not proven effective in disincentivizing unlawful diversions, and SWRCB’s authority to stop unlawful diversions and apply fines therefore has not proven effective in stopping certain recent massive diversions that ultimately proved unlawful.

While the bills’ proponents claim that these three (3) bills do nothing more than make the current legal/regulatory structure work more effectively, the Association of California Water Agencies (ACWA), which represents roughly 450 water agencies, claims that they radically transform the way the state’s water rights system is implemented, managed, and enforced. ACWA’s legislative advocate has gone as far as to suggest very publicly that these three bills taken together would lead to damaging unintended consequences for both senior water rights holders and communities and businesses that depend upon a reliable water supply.

Who’s right? Our take: Both, albeit it would seem that ACWA is a little more “right” than the bill proponents. On one hand much of what these bills aim to achieve amounts to giving the state the tools necessary to execute extant law. On the other hand, to the degree to which much of what these bills portend have been found by appellate courts to be beyond the law’s current authority, ACWA’s claims about transformation ring true. Whether it portends “radical” transformation cum damaging unintended consequences or whether that description is more hyperbole than reality is not clear to us, but it is certainly true that much about these bills is parallel to the situation in the Colorado Basin. Both open Pandora’s Box of senior rights, riparian rights, and pre-1914 rights in an effort to reconcile those rights with the water facts on the ground while vitiating them de facto without doing so de jure. ACWA’s reaction might be a bit over the top, but the consortium of 450 water agencies sees through the fog to what can only in the long run be the same reopening of old intra-California arrangements as the ongoing interstate recalibrations in the Colorado Basin.

As these bills move to their respective other houses for vetting, we’ll be watching to see whether they remain intact or are amended per language offered in their original houses of origin that conceded the need to restructure the way the state acquires and manages usage/diversion data as well as the need for much better monitoring. ACWA carries great weight in Sacramento. In previous years, these bills would have either died by now or moved forward with significant amendments.

What to make of all this? Sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly, sometimes painfully, sometimes litigiously, the laws and regulations regarding water are going to change. They will be brought into alignment with changed circumstances. Period; hard stop. Golf needs to plan accordingly.
Acting

Whether “Public Golf Endangerment Acts,” independent contracting, gas powered equipment, glyphosate, or COVID, the California golf community has been highly active in recent legislative sessions.

This session gave us a much-needed break. We felt the need to weigh in on only four (4) bills, three of which we felt that with certain amendments we could support and only one which we thought merited opposition.

It gives us nothing but pleasure to report that the three (3) bills we felt merited support with amendments passed the Assembly with those amendments and the one bill we felt merited opposition didn’t make it out of its policy committee of reference.

• AB 363 (Bauer-Kahan; D-Orinda) – proposes protocols for adopting controls on non-agricultural use of neonicotinoids by 2026. A bill that would have outright banned the non-agricultural use of neonicotinoids and provided no room for enabling licensed applicators in activities other than agriculture was vetoed by Governor Newsom last year. For those reasons, and not for reasons of opposing restrictions on the use of neonicotinoids, the California golf community opposed last year’s bill but with this year’s changes, which met all of golf’s objections to last year’s bill, golf has no problems with the study proposed therein, the restrictions proposed therein, or the window left open to enable very limited non-agricultural applications like those involved in golf.
• AB 1572 & AB 1573 (Friedman; D-Burbank) – these companion bills cover slightly different territory in curtailing the use of potable water to irrigate “non-functional turf.” While golf courses are defined in California’s Codes, including the Model Water Efficient Landscape Ordinance (MWELO) as “Special Landscape Areas” and thus part of the category of turf designated as “functional” and thus exempt from the restrictions contained in these two bills, certain environmental organizations and media outlets frequently refer to golf courses as “non-functional” for the purposes of accommodating various drought protocols and emergency curtailment situations. We brought that to the attention of the author, who then amended both bills to specifically designate golf as part of the family of recreational activities exempt from the bill’s non-functional restrictions as follows: “Recreational use area” means an area designated by a property owner or a government agency to accommodate human foot traffic for recreation, such as sports fields, golf courses, playgrounds, picnic grounds, or pet exercise areas. Such recreation may be either formal or informal.

The inclusion of this language in AB 1572 and 1573 may strike some as much ado about little, but to those who labor in the fields of legislative advocacy and understand how legislative language easily becomes embedded in the codes and picked up in future pieces of legislation, it’s significant. Just ask the game’s national organizations how much damage golf’s categorization as an activity unworthy of emergency relief in some 1977 IRS language got picked up in subsequent legislation dealing with eligibility for federal disaster assistance. Call it what you will – incorporation by reference or copy and paste – damaging language and beneficial language once established in the codes can be hard to disestablish.

AB 1590, which we reported on earlier this year, was a bill that would have prohibited the use of all non-organic inputs on any golf resort containing a 300-room hotel in the California Coastal Zone. The bill was as bizarre as it was limited in scope – only 6 golf resorts in the state by our count; however, to the extent to which the rationale for the bill was the use of non-organics on golf courses in the coastal zone, the effect of passage could have provided a very slippery slope toward such prohibition on scores of golf courses in the state. The bill collapsed in the Assembly Natural Resources Committee once the legislators recognized what we came to understand only at that Committee’s hearing. It was not a serious piece of legislation, but rather another round in Unite Here Local 11’s ongoing battle with the Terrenea Golf Resort on the south side of the Palos Verdes Peninsula.
Concluding

While the stakes were certainly much larger the last few years, particularly with respect to those municipal golf endangerment acts, the 2023 session is shaping up quite nicely. Golf continues to punch above its weight – way above its weight. And while we can take a measure of pride in that, what we should much more take away is the need to add some weight.

And let me share that at least in the Southern part of the state, golf’s advocacy functionality has added weight. The USGA has granted SCGA a Boatwright Intern dedicated exclusively to Public Affairs. His name is Kyle Newell. He is a 2^nd year MBA student at USC. He started with us last week. The Southern California PGA Section has hired Matt Rogers to oversee Public Affairs as well as lend his skills to other Section duties. Matt collaborated with us last year on AB 1910 and some other initiatives. He had previously worked in the office of California Congressman Mike Garcia (R-Santa Clarita). With Kyle and Matt on board we’ll be able to “punch” even higher. It’s a good thing. Just as we know that this year’s rain and snow was but a temporary reprieve from what promises to be ongoing water problems, this year’s lighter legislative load was but a temporary break from increasing Sacramento challenges.

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After next week’s U.S. Open, we’ll return with updates on the Colorado River situation, what the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Sackett v. Environmental Protection Agency about “waters of the United States” means for us in California, and good news about efforts to stave off development of some municipal and daily fee facilities. And whatever else pops up in two weeks. Something always does. Multiple somethings usually.

Article provided by Craig Kessler, SCGA

May 11, 2023

The “suspense” round of legislative Appropriations hearings is scheduled for next week.  That is when the Assembly and Senate Appropriations Committees speed through hundreds of bills that have cleared their committees of reference to see which among them move to their respective floors and which are put on “suspense,” otherwise known as all but dead for the year.  The second round takes place in August when bills from the other house go through the same abbreviated process to see which among them move forward toward the Governor’s desk.

In short, this is the Legislature’s way of killing bills that too many of the members consider sufficiently controversial that they just don’t want to take a vote or issue a position thereon. 

Unlike recent sessions in which the California golf community had a compelling interest in amending, mitigating, or defeating certain bills, this session has offered up bills that merited watching for myriad reasons, but nothing particularly more than that.  There was one exception – AB 1590 (Friedman; D-Burbank), a bill that would have banned the use of all non-organic pesticides and fertilizers on golf courses owned and attached to large resorts in the California coastal zone. 

There may be no more than 6 such golf resorts in the state, but to the degree to which the subject of the bill was not resorts, but the application of approved fertilizers, the distance between applying to 6 courses and 60 courses would have been a very short and straight line.  The irony in this strange bill is that golf courses outside California’s coastal zone are already highly restricted in many of the non-organics used in other states, and golf courses within the coastal zone are restricted well over and above that by the California Coastal Commission and the State Agricultural Commissioner, among others. 

AB 1590 crashed before the Assembly Natural Resources Committee with a thud rarely heard for a bill of a clear “environmental” bent before that particular Committee.  It was an ill-conceived bill to be sure and one that had to make legislators with one or more of those 60 courses in their district nervous, but we still expected it to pass out of committee before perhaps dying when it got to Assembly Appropriations next week.  But we were spared the angst associated with having to wait.

The same cannot be said for certain bills that we have been watching with interest this session that deal very specifically with the unraveling of certain riparian and pre-1914 water rights that have long been untouchable – a pattern of reconsideration similar to the upending on the table in the Colorado Basin, where California’s senior rights are not likely to hold to the degree to which doing so could endanger the flow of drinking water to Phoenix and Tucson. 

• AB 460 (Bauer-Kahan; D-Orinda) – Would authorize the State Water Resources Control Board (SWRCB) to fine farmers and others who “unlawfully” divert water that the agency deems injurious to the environment, which raises the following question:  Is a diversion “unlawful” if it violates the California Constitution’s invocation of the state’s ability to control the use of water for public benefit or is it “unlawful” if it exceeds the senior rights held by the diverter?  There is already a remedy for the latter under water law and the state’s codes, and that is why ACWA and others opposing the legislation are so adamant in their opposition, despite protestations from the bill’s supporters that AB 460 doesn’t obviate long-held senior water rights. 
• AB 1337 (Wicks; D-Oakland) – Would give the Water Resources Control Board more authority to limit diversions from rivers by those who now hold the most senior water rights, including pre-1914 rights.
• SB 389 (Allen; D-Santa Monica) – Considered a companion to AB 1337 to the degree to which it too upends certain longstanding senior water rights by giving the SWRCB specific authority to limit the holders of pre-1914 rights’ ability to divert water when deemed inconsistent with environmental needs as determined by the SWRCB.

These bills have passed out of their policy committees and are on their way to Appropriations.  The California Chamber of Commerce, the California Farm Bureau, and Association of California Water Agencies (ACWA) have vigorously opposed them and tried to secure significant amendments – efforts thus far in vain.  In the past, whenever ACWA viscerally has opposed a water bill, that bill has generally died.  We’re watching to see whether the pattern holds, and these bills die in Appropriations, or whether we’ve arrived at the day long predicted when pre-1914 rights, senior arrangements, and the old arrangements like the “Law of the Colorado River” are forced to succumb to the realities of aridification.

These bills are not to be confused with those water, turf, and land use bills that we are also watching but watching much more to see how they play out in a way we believe will result in something that moves forward to the Governor’s desk after September 14 than how they fare in the two Appropriations Committees.  More about those in a future Update.
  

NATIONAL GOLF DAY

Yesterday was National Golf Day.  Three hundred (300) golf course superintendents, PGA golf professionals, golf course owners, and leaders of the game’s national organizations descended on Capitol Hill to share 1) the game’s national legislative agenda with Senators and Representatives, and 2) the social, philanthropic, and environmental value golf courses provide for communities across the nation.

Much of that “national legislative agenda” is rendered irrelevant in California by virtue of an independent and much more rigorous regulatory structure – that and a set of interests cum priorities that often deviate from the national game.  Our national brethren seem to think that crowing about representing 0.003% of the GDP impresses law and policy makers, while our experience informs us that the economic argument is not only golf’s weakest argument, it is virtually always the strongest argument made by those who would turn the state’s golf courses into residential or commercial enterprises.  That was certainly the case re AB 672 and AB 1910, and it is the case every time the owner of a daily fee golf facility seeks the zoning changes necessary to turn their property into a housing tract or something as mundane as an RV park or storage center, just to cite a couple of very recent examples in Los Angeles County.  Yes, an RV park is a much higher and better economic use of land than most golf courses! 

However, there are parts of that national legislative agenda that are relevant in our state.  The lobbying our 300 brethren did yesterday on behalf of adding more dollars for turf research in the farm bill certainly benefitted the California golf community.  And after 17 years of pushing for legislation to remove the golf industry from what we’ve come to call the “sin list,” the “Coalition” that organizes National Golf Day has managed to finally secure a bill that would enable golf to benefit from federal emergency largesse when disaster in the form of flood, fire, or earthquake strikes, as well as benefit from certain community development programs that the game has long been denied access.  House Resolution 3124 (HR 3124), sponsored by New York Representative Claudia Tenney and co-sponsored by Monterey California’s Representative Jimmy Panetta would remove golf from the following provision of the Internal Revenue Code [144(c)(6)(B)]:

“No portion of the proceeds of such issue is to be used to provide (including the provision of land for) any private or commercial golf course, country club, massage parlor, hot tub facility, suntan facility, racetrack or other facility used for gambling, or any store the principal business of which is the sale of alcoholic beverages for consumption off premises.”

Now, you see why golf has come to refer to its inclusion in this categorical exclusion as being on the “sin list.”  Indeed, it was the realization after Hurricane Katrina that golf was considered as offering the same the social utility of gambling barges, liquor stores, and massage parlors that prompted the creation of the Coalition that among other things now sponsors National Golf Day.

HR 3124 is a placeholder for now; it has yet to be populated with language.  But it’s a start, a hook if you will that we would hope would be pursued vigorously by the national organizations that set the agenda for the “American Golf Industry Coalition.”  Because it’s going to take a lot of work to turn this bill into law.    

National Golf Day is just that – one day.  We do the equivalent in California – a day when many of us traipse the halls of Sacramento.  But both are just one day.  It’s what you do the other 364 days that matters.     

GOLF’S GREAT NIGHT IN DUARTE

We had the joy of participating in a meeting of the Duarte City Council a couple of weeks ago in which a very preliminary proposal to repurpose a daily fee 9-hole executive golf course cum driving range as an RV Park / storage facility was all but killed by a City Council that made clear that the rezoning necessary to repurpose the property would not be in the offing.  Duarte is a 22,000-person bedroom community in Los Angeles’ San Gabriel Valley, roughly 10 miles due east of Pasadena.  The small golf facility in question (Rancho Duarte) sits atop a long-closed landfill, making it incompatible with much higher and better economic repurposing like housing or retail; however, for something like an RV park or storage facility very much so. 

While no specific application had been filed or was even before Council that evening, the absentee owners of the golf facility were directed by Council to engage the local community before seeking the zone change that would allow them to sell the golf course to a developer for that RV park / storage facility.  As a golf course it is worth little on the open market.  As an RV park it has substantial resale value in this community.  Stop and consider that for a moment – AS A GOLF COURSE IT HAS LITTLE ECONOMIC VALUE; AS AN RV PARK / STORAGE FACILITY IT IS WORTH MILLIONS TO ITS CURRENT GOLF COURSE OWNER – but only if it can be rezoned low grade commercial as opposed to open space/recreation.  For that reason, one member of the City Council approached us (roughly 100 golfers, most of them juniors) after the meeting to remind us to remain vigilant.  People tend not to give up when the subject is money.

What “saved” the golf course that night?  All the things that cannot be counted financially that a golf facility like this brings to the life of the community in which it is located.  In this case:

• The environmental, heat sink, and water table advantages of green space over hardscape.
• The quiet enjoyment provided to the neighborhood by having a green space in their midst as opposed to a parking lot cum storage structures.
• A local junior program operated by an accomplished PGA golf professional who has taught Lizette Salas and Angel Yin among others and provides $2 per session junior golf programming on site in addition to a local competitive junior tour that offers playing opportunities in the region at a fraction of the cost of the others in the region – a program and tour that looks like the Asian/Latino population that makes up the City of Duarte.
• A community beyond local golfers and homeowners that showed up to indicate the value a golf course adds to a region beyond a local community, whether they play the game or not.

What didn’t “save” the golf course?  Any hint of the economic benefit of the golf course.  Indeed, just to make sure that it was clear to everyone in the room, we included in our remarks that if it’s money that is the deciding metric (tax receipts too), the RV Park has the golf course beaten by a wide margin.  But if it’s all the things that make living in Duarte a quality community experience, an RV park is no substitute for the multi-faceted value proposition represented by this little golf course.  Getting that on the record at the dawn of what may be a continuing challenge if the Council Member who came up to us after the meeting is correct, was a strategic move to get out in front of what may be a more lucrative permitted use some other potential buyer may have in mind for these absentee owners who clearly want to get out from under ownership of the Rancho Duarte Golf Course.  It also stimulated a little discussion of the city considering taking the property off their hands and turning it into a municipal asset.

Article provided by Craig Kessler, SCGA

Monday, April 24, 2023

To live in Southern California is not only to understand how it is possible to be on flood watch and drought watch at the same time, it is to understand also how it is possible to live during the greatest growth period in the game’s history in the most golf starved market in the United States while losing golf courses of all types and sizes.  We conservatively count thirty (30) facilities that have been closed, reduced, or are under threat of both in just the last few years. 

Yes, we staved off what could have been a feeding frenzy on municipal golf courses when we beat back Assembly Bills 672 and 1910.  But that didn’t slow market capitalism’s steady march of daily fee conversions to higher and better financial uses, and it didn’t stop environmentalism’s steady press for the repurposing of active recreational areas to passive uses. 

Maybe the owners of daily fee properties and the developers that repurposed them along with the city planners that facilitated the projects didn’t read all those economic impact reports the golf industry puts out about all the jobs, taxes, and multiplier economic benefits the game produces.  Or maybe they know of what they do, and what they’re doing is making a whole lot more money doing things other than golf.  Just maybe the value that golf courses bring to the communities in which they sit has little to do with the kind of value that can be counted the way economists count value and everything to do with the ways much more difficult to count – recreation, green space, heat relief, water resiliency, community centers, etc.  And just maybe it is those things that golf might be better pressed to spend its limited resources sharing with policy makers.      

California is not just the land of permanent drought; it’s the land of permanent contradiction, where exploding demand is met by shrinking supply and accusations that bots control Internet reservation systems.  How else can tee sheets be completely sold out 9 days in advance in less than 20 seconds, critics complain, never considering that it’s not the bots that are the problem; it’s the market that created their value that’s the problem. 

The National Golf Foundation (NGF) may be flooding the World Wide Web with reports of golf’s great growth spurt and judging by those packed public tee sheets (private club waiting lists too) the same holds true in Southern California.  But that growth will be impossible to sustain without places for all of them to play. 

It’s the elephant in golf’s room and just happens to be the subject of Craig Kessler’s Public Affairs piece in the Spring issue of SCGA’s hard copy magazine FORE, which just went up on SCGA’s website (scga.org) and is hitting members’ homes this week.  So, we are going to do something that we have never done in an SCGA Public Affairs Update – reprint the piece so that the many of you who don’t receive FORE can read it.  It puts a lot more meat on the bones summarized here.

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Golf’s “Struggle” To See What’s Under Its Nose

The USGA’s “Team USA” initiative may put more Americans on PGA leaderboards and American golfers on Olympic podiums, but here in Southern California we need to figure out how to accommodate an exploding golf population on fewer golf courses, a feat that is not really possible, or at least not possible at a price structure conducive to the game’s aspirations to diversify and grow its base. What was it that we all learned in Econ 101 about supply and demand? Many in golf act as though they missed that lesson. Blinders don’t change what’s in front of you; they just obscure it.

For those who thought that beating back the “Public Golf Endangerment Act” (AB 1910) beat back the game’s “development” problem, think again. For those who thought that the game’s development problem was just an urban problem, look deeper at what’s happening well outside California’s urban core. For those who thought that they could ignore the signpost known as zero daily-fee golf courses in the City of Los Angeles, take off the blinders. And for those who think that we’ll muddle through the drying out of the Colorado Basin without serious consequences for the Southern California golf community, kindly pay heed to what California’s six partners in the Colorado Compact have proposed.

AB 1910 may have been enough of a crude overreach that golf was able to awaken enough of the state’s 3.5 million golfers to a danger so obvious that even a community as complacent as golf was able to rally enough of its members to take action — a community that had been asleep at the legislative switch for so long that the opposition came as a genuine surprise to the proponents of the bill. Caveat: You can only surprise people once, particularly people who are active in politics. As the laws keep evolving to prefer housing over parks, open space and recreation, golf cannot be content to merely duplicate last year’s campaign and expect the same successful result.

Land Under Pressure

As for those who have suggested that the effort to repurpose golf courses is only a problem in densely packed urban areas where land is scarce, take a closer look at what is in the process of befalling Glen Annie GC in the Goleta area of Santa Barbara County. Glen Annie has long been zoned “agricultural,” along with the rest of the open space and avocado orchards surrounding it. Given that efforts to construct housing to meet the needs of an exploding student population at nearby UC Santa Barbara have long been met with failure in the planning processes of Santa Barbara County, the owners of Glen Annie understood that unless they preferred harvesting avocados to greens fees, any effort to develop their land for residential or commercial purposes was an exercise in futility.

Not anymore. Faced with the threat of the “builders remedies” that would follow from failing to offer up substantial tracts of land for housing development, the County of Santa Barbara moved to rezone substantial tracts of agricultural properties as residential in order to keep the State of California at bay.

Included among these agricultural tracts was Glen Annie. The same process of market capitalism that destroyed the daily fee market in the City of Los Angeles is now in the process of operating in rural Santa Barbara County, and by implication is likely to be duplicated in other rural communities that have failed to meet the state’s onerous new housing element requirements.

As for those who suggest that economic analyses of golf’s multiplier effects can save this particular day, let me suggest that only those who have not read the development proposals I have read could suggest such a thing. Current case in point: the repurposing of 75 of Los Angeles Royal Vista’s 157-acre 27-hole daily fee golf course in Los Angeles County’s unincorporated community of Walnut in the San Gabriel Valley. The county’s independent financial analysis of this massive housing development has concluded that repurposing will create new county revenues of $2.86 million per year, $1.82 million of which will go to the county’s general fund, as well as 1,852 jobs and the multiplier economic benefits that follow from adding hundreds of new households where now only day-tripping golfers add to the local economy.

The developers are throwing in a seven-acre public access park at their own expense, along with a series of trails through a housing complex, 20 percent of which qualifies as affordable. While this project is a particularly laudable one in terms of community amenities, in addition to the financial advantages and housing construction that are part of all of these project proposals, it’s not an outlier by any means. Golf will continue to lose out to them, even in an area of the nation that the NGF has declared the most golf-starved market in the continental United States.

Water Woes

Those who believe that the retrenchment of the Colorado Basin won’t affect a Southern California golf community long accustomed to a fixed and generous allocation guaranteed by senior rights and privileges need to take a close look at the methodology that California’s six partners in the Compact have proposed — an “evaporation” methodology that just happens to repose almost all the burden of ceding 2-4 million acre-feet of water on California.

While those six states don’t really believe that their proposed methodology will come to fruition, they have succeeded in making clear that the days of slavish adherence to all those past arrangements are over. A new day not yet determined and not knowable is upon us, but this much we do know: The “new day” won’t include the generous and disproportionate Colorado River allocation upon which California has long relied for its full complement of imports. It’s not a matter of whether, only of how much.

Whether at the federal or state level, these are signposts that should inform golf that a cascade of changes that are sure to eventually affect the game are in the offing.

See, Study, Act

These are some of the things that I see, hear, read, and confront that cause me to issue what can best be described here as a Jeremiad. Let me suggest that because he served for years as LPGA commissioner before being named CEO of the USGA, Mike Whan was uniquely positioned to see something about the way the American competitive game is organized to cause him to understand that unless something is done to change it in terms of developing young talent in a more organized and supportive way, the PGA Tour could easily lose much of its current stronghold on the American imagination, leading to a cascade of consequences that the business of the game would find troublesome.

Whan saw, studied, thought, and then acted. That is how I would describe the birth of Team USA. I can only hope that before it’s too late, some of the game’s leaders will see, study, think and then take the parallel actions necessary at the community level to do what other sports and recreational activities have long done: Recognized that absent the creation of amply funded facilities programs, golf is destined to lose the very playing fields it needs to sustain current levels of participation, let alone grow and diversify.

As George Orwell put it in his famous 1946 essay about our bottomless capacity to hold contradictory ideas in our heads at the same time, “To see what is in front of one’s nose takes a constant struggle.”

A little more “struggle” and a little less adherence to dogma might focus the game’s attention on what it needs most.

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Descending the pulpit, or if you prefer, signing off from the soapbox.

Article provided by Craig Kessler, SCGA

Thursday, April 13, 2023

A glance at the front page of Wednesday’s Los Angeles Times tells you all you need to know about where California stands with respect to water. The lead headline was “Deep snow adds months of flood risk.”  The headline just below and to its side was “Water cuts:  Varied or uniform?”

To live in Southern California, indeed, to live almost anywhere in the vast expanse of the American Southwest, is to understand how it is possible to face flood and drought at the same time.  The winter rains may have been torrential – 31 atmospheric rivers in all – and the Sierra snowpack may be at record levels, but the Colorado Basin that supplies Southern California’s second major source of imports remains in the throes of a dry period unequaled in 1,500 years.  And that is why the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation took the moment Tuesday to apply pressure to the three (3) states of the Lower Colorado Basin, the “Reclamation” states of Nevada, Arizona, and California, to come to some sort of negotiated agreement to cede as much as 2 million acre-feet of water between now and 2026, when all seven states in the Colorado Compact are going to be asked to negotiate as much as 4 million acre-feet of permanent givebacks to bring their collective allocations in sync with the River’s volumetric production. 

The Bureau, very much in sync with the Biden White House, applied pressure by countering the options put forward in late January by six (6) of the seven (7) states on one hand and California on the other by offering three (3) “options” that provide a more focused framework for moving forward.  There are really only two options, given that one of them is the standard do nothing scenario. 

Under one of the two (2) do something options, the federal government would commandeer the Secretary of the Interior’s authority under “emergency conditions to provide for human health and safety” by issuing across-the-board cuts in equal percentages for both senior and junior rights holders that would amount to roughly 13% cuts in addition to the cuts agreed to by the three lower basin states (Nevada, Arizona, and California) back in 2019.  Given that California is the holder of the most senior of the senior rights associated directly with the myriad covenants and actions that taken together have come to be called the “law of the river,” this option would prove disproportionately impactful on California, particularly its agricultural sector.

Under the other of the do something options, the federal government would issue cuts based upon the existing rights and priorities under the “law of the river,” which would mean minimal or even no cuts for California and devastating cuts for Nevada and Arizona, particularly Arizona, as the aqueduct that brings drinking water to Phoenix and Tucson would likely be cut back to near zero. 

The across-the-board in equal amounts approach would no doubt cause California to litigate and at minimum cause undue harm through delay if nothing else.  The senior rights approach would put Arizona out of business.  The first option foolish; the second option unacceptable.

So, what’s going on?  Only the Department of the Interior, its Bureau of Reclamation, and the Biden White House know for sure, but all the smart money is on the following:  The federal government is making clear that it behooves California and the other six states to negotiate an acceptable compromise between a slavish adherence to an allocation formula inconsistent with what Mother Nature’s provision and a solution that vitiates all the prior agreements and arrangements upon which California in particular reasonably relied to create a water delivery infrastructure capable of supporting 40 million persons and the 5^th largest economy in the world.  

There is a political wrinkle in here to consider.  As numerous pundits, politicos, and the New York Times have pointed out, Nevada and Arizona are very tight swing states with Senate seats up for election in 2024 that are held in one case by an incumbent Democrat and in the other an Independent who caucuses with the Democrats and with Electoral Votes in play that were in President Biden’s column by very slender margins in 2020.  Given California’s politics, there is no political downside to being rhetorically tough on California at the expense of Arizona and Nevada.   

Bottom line for golf in Central and Southern California:  While coping with the floods sure to come, prepare to begin coming to terms with the fact that one of the major sources of imported water is almost certain to be curtailed, first temporarily and then permanently.  This will mean different things in different places.  Such is always the case with water – it’s always about local conditions and supplies.  But it will mean something in almost every place that now imports water from the Colorado River.  And that means that in each one of those places the golf community needs to either remain engaged, or in many cases get engaged, with its local retailer and the City or Special District that oversees it to anticipate and then cope with that meaning.      

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Major Coastal Resorts Environmental Accountability Act
AB 1590  [Friedman; D-Burbank]
Introduced as a spot or placeholder bill on the final day to file bills in this year’s session (February 17), AB 1590 was populated with substantive content subsequent thereto that among many other things would “prohibit the use of any nonorganic pesticide, as defined, or fertilizing material, as defined, at a major coastal resort.” 

For the purposes of its provisions the bill defines a “major coastal resort” as a resort or hotel that meets all of the following:  1) Is composed of more than 300 guest rooms or units; 2) includes or operates a golf course on the premises; and 3) is located in whole or in part in the coastal zone. 

While many of the bill’s particulars are not entirely clear, they are clear about the proscription on the use of all nonorganic pesticides and fertilizers on a golf course that is part of a “major coastal resort” containing 300 or more guest rooms.  Whether the rooms and the golf course need be under the same ownership for the proscription to apply and/or whether the room count is an aggregate one or one restricted specifically to the golf course to which the rooms are attached – that is not clear, although it may become clear as the bill continues to be amended.

The bill has incurred significant opposition from the quarters one would expect, and any and all golf properties that might or might not come under the bill’s prohibitions are at minimum carefully watching the bill.  The California Alliance for Golf (CAG) is “watching” the bill and contemplating possible action.  Very few golf courses fit the bill’s particulars; however, the slope that would take the state from such proscriptions on large resorts cum golf functionality to proscriptions on all golf facilities within earshot of the “coastal zone” is a slippery one.  As some have discovered when trying to develop a golf property that is outside the coastal zone but somewhat contiguous to it, the California Coastal Commission often asserts jurisdiction thereover.     

Click here to read the bill as currently amended.

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Meet New SCGA Executive Director Mike Kelly

Click here to view SCGA’s new Executive Director Mike Kelly’s personalized message to the SCGA Public Affairs family.

Article provided by Craig Kessler, SCGA

Monday, March 27, 2023

Mother Nature may be blessing us, and the state legislature may be giving us a rest, but the fundamentals that make the surcease so welcome remain firmly in place. 

First up, Mother Nature.

With the Northern Sierra snowpack at near record levels and likely to hit record levels before April 1, and the Southern Sierra snowpack already at record levels:

• Governor Newsom has rescinded most of the elements of last year’s emergency drought order, including the call for all water suppliers to invoke Level 2 of their water shortage contingency plans, otherwise known as 20% reductions;
• State Water Project allocations are up to 75% and likely to go higher after April 1;
• MWD has rescinded the 35% curtailment order it issued to 7 million of its customers last June; and
• The state’s two largest reservoirs are at 78 and 82 percent of capacity before the spring snowmelt; what 60 days ago was worry about running perilously short of water has been replaced by worry about flooding.

On the other hand, snowpack and surface water are but two of California’s sources of homegrown fresh water.  The other is groundwater.  And while you are likely aware that one great precipitation year doesn’t refill groundwater basins the same way that rain and snowmelt fill reservoirs, you may not be aware that the gains made in the wet years of the 20^th Century were never enough to offset the pumping that occurred during the non-wet years in between.  Estimates of the amount of subsurface water California has lost since its entry into the American Union in 1850 range from 110 million acre-feet to 140 million acre-feet in just the Central Valley alone.  Other areas have fared better, but there have been long-term losses, nonetheless.  The great exception is the Coachella Valley, which has for the most part kept its aquifer in a state of replenishment. 

But hovering over both the Coachella Valley “exception” and the rest of Southern California is that other great source of imported water – the Colorado Basin.  One good year in California cannot and will not do much to raise the levels of those two mega-reservoirs known as Lake Mead and Lake Powell that supply water from the Colorado Basin.  The water levels in both, which are at roughly 28% of capacity, barely above “dead pool” in terms of their ability to generate electricity, won’t rise much based off this one wet winter.  And given that those levels were at 50% in 2014 when the state stared down its last spike in the current 20-year megadrought, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out why the federal government has directed the seven states that form the Colorado Compact to come to agreement on ceding some portion of their extant allotments now to tide the Basin over until 2026 when the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation estimates that 2-4 million-acre-feet of allocation must be ceded on a permanent basis.  The hotter, drier conditions that have given rise to the worst drought in the Basin in 1,200 years aren’t receding anytime soon.

While California’s six other partners in the Colorado Compact don’t really believe their recent proposal to ignore senior water rights, past agreements, and federally sanctioned allocation formulas in favor an evaporation methodology that just happens to repose almost all the burden of ceding 2-4-million-acre-feet of water on California is going to come to fruition, they have succeeded in making clear that the days of slavish adherence to all those past arrangements that taken together have come to be known as the “Law of the River” are over.  A new day not yet determined and not knowable is upon us, but this much we do know:  That the “new day” won’t include the generous and disproportionate Colorado River allocation upon which California has long relied for its full complement of imports.  It’s not a matter of whether; just of how much. 

No doubt California will cede a portion of its current allocation within a framework that doesn’t concede any of its rights under the “Law of the River,” but it will cede a portion on some basis to bring the Basin upon which 40 million Americans rely into some semblance of stasis.  California has done just that before – most recently in the form of 2003’s Quantification Settlement Agreement in which the state permanently reduced its Colorado River water use by 800,000 acre-feet per year through various water management programs that turned out to be the largest agricultural-to-urban water conservation and transfer agreement in American history.  And California will do it again.  And that will have an impact separate and apart from what happens in the Sierra Nevada. 

But with the reprieve we just got in the form of record rains and snows, we’ve gained some time to harvest the fruits of some of the investments Southern California has made in constructing the water capture, storage, and conveyance mechanisms better suited to 21^st Century realities than the 20^th Century infrastructure that is no longer capable of meeting the needs of a 40-million person state that represents the 5^th largest economy in the world – e.g., stormwater capture, aquifer replenishment, potable and non-potable reuse, desalination.  Example:  The parcel fee measure that 70% of Los Angeles County’s voters approved in 2018 to fund stormwater capture cum various forms of reuse. 

More specifically, golf can use the reprieve to gain the attention of policymakers and water wholesalers/retailers for the dispensations and programs capable of allowing for those kinds of long-term changes like re-grassing, turf removal, lake relining, and irrigation upgrades that taken together over time permanently reduce water consumption between drought emergencies.  Crises and emergencies crowd out long-term policy thinking in favor of short-term crisis management.  Moments like these are the only moments when golf can gain the attention of policymakers to entertain longer term strategies and tactics for aligning golf with what is really a state of permanent drought, or if you prefer, permanent deprivation, in an effort to keep the game an integral part of Southern California’s recreational lifestyle.  A “sunbelt” without golf is not much of a sunbelt. 

Next up, the 2023 legislative session.

There are no AB 672’s or 1910’s in this year’s queue of bills.  From that we can take some solace in having demonstrated in the last two legislative sessions that as the Los Angeles Times pointed out in its 2022 Sunday editorial on AB 1910:  While the housing crisis militates in strong favor of at least considering any and all ideas with the slightest possibility of ameliorating a critical housing shortage, the municipal golf courses are near the bottom of a long list of much better places to address it.  [Paraphrase, not a quote]

On the other hand . . . AB 1910 may have been enough of a crude overreach that golf was able to awaken enough of the state’s 3.5 million golfers to a danger so obvious that even a community as complacent as golf was able to rally enough of its members to take action – a community that had so long been asleep at the legislative switch that the opposition came as a genuine surprise to the proponents of the bill.  Caveat:  You only surprise once, particularly those who are active in politics.  As the laws keep evolving to prefer housing over parks, open space, and recreation, golf cannot rest content that it can merely duplicate last year’s campaign and expect the same successful result.

To that end we are tracking a slew of bills that continue to amend the Surplus Land Act to give affordable housing priority over open space/recreation, and we are tracking a slew of bills that bypass local control in favor of truncated ministerial approval processes for certain kinds of housing projects.

It’s not that any of these bills take aim at golf per se, but as a sector that encumbers substantial tracts of land in the hearts of many of California’s densest cities and suburbs, golf has to recognize that ONLY to the degree to which the communities in which these tracts are located consider those golf courses genuine community assets environmentally, socially, and otherwise will those tracts remain golf courses in the long term.  To suggest that the economic argument for their continued existence rings hollow is to understate the weakness of that argument.  One need only take a look at what constitutes the golf community in the City of Los Angeles, the nation’s 2^nd largest city smack in the middle of the nation’s largest golf market, where the only golf that exists today is either private club or municipal.  Once the site of myriad daily fee golf courses, Los Angeles today is home to none.  That should tell one all one needs to know about the financial fecundity of golf versus the other kinds of land uses that have displaced it.  Yet it seems that we have to keep repeating it over and over again to crack through some of the game’s leadership organizations.

One bill of interest that doesn’t take aim at golf but poses dangers nonetheless is Chris Ward’s (D-San Diego) AB 68.  Click here to read the full text of the bill.  What piques our interest are the organizations sponsoring the bill – YIMBY (Yes in my Backyard), the group that sponsored and pushed the hardest for AB 1910, and The Nature Conservancy, a mainstream environmental organization that by virtue of this co-sponsorship has determined that solving the housing shortage by developing only in already densely settled urban environments represents a meld between the housing crisis and environmentalism – or as the title of last Friday’s op-ed in the Los Angeles Times co-authored by YIMBY’s Chief Operating Officer Melissa Breach and the Nature Conservancy’s Director of Sustainable and Resilient Communities Liz O’Donoghue more directly put the proposition:  “California’s housing shortage is an environmental problem.”

As we have written more than once and always with proper credit to James Carville, “it’s the land, stupid.”  It’s clear that this YIMBY/Nature Conservancy alliance that announces itself as “California’s housing shortage is an environmental problem” is not likely to consider a municipal golf course a park, green space, or environmental refuge for the purposes of preservation.  And we doubt they’ll see much wisdom in continuing to tax private equity golf clubs in tony urban neighborhoods as open space.  But as we learned in last year’s AB 1910 episode, there are many urban legislators who don’t share their view of golf, and it is to those legislators that golf must continue to conduct itself to make true a narrative that positions golf courses as community assets environmentally, socially, and otherwise.  Make “true” with deeds, not with “spin” as some sort of public relations yarn. 

As for the fate of AB 68 in the 2023 session suffice it to say that the California Building Industry, which was silent during the AB 1910 episode, has called the bill a “housing killer,” and the California Chamber of Commerce has put it on its 2023 short list of “job killers.”  We’ll be watching to see what Assembly Housing & Community Development Committee Chair Buffy Wicks (D-Oakland) does with it.  The Oakland Assemblymember, who many find the odds-on favorite to assume the Chairmanship of the Assembly Budget Committee when Robert Rivas (D-Hollister) assumes the Speakership from Anthony Rendon (D-Lakewood) in July, was a vocal supporter of AB 1910 and opposes moving from 6% to 7% the percentage of California land mass dedicated to developed space. 

Of the water bills with traction in the 2023 session, bills like Laura Friedman’s (D-Burbank) effort to curtail the use of potable irrigation on non-functional turf (AB 1572 & 1573), none seek to recategorize golf as non-functional or to take golf out of the class of “Special Landscape Areas” (SLA’s) that in California law protect the use of turf in parks, cemeteries, sports fields, and golf courses.  But we track them nonetheless, because there are organizations like the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) that persist in trying to change the biological needs (evapotranspiration factor) of turf through legislative/regulatory fiat.  Again, golf’s response cannot be to simply oppose such things, but as golf has done with the California’s Department of Water Resources (DWR) in its continuing updates of the state’s Model Water Efficient Landscape Ordinance (MWELO), propose regulatory paradigms that guarantee the game’s use of less water in ways consistent as opposed to inconsistent with nature, biology, and sound agronomic/business practices. 

However, there is one water bill, or more accurately companion bills in the Assembly and Senate, that don’t have traction in our opinion but bear close scrutiny for what they portend.  At this point Assembly Member Rebecca Bauer-Kahan’s (D-Portola Valley) AB 460 and Senator Ben Allen’s (D-Redondo Beach) SB 389 are more the opening of a conversation than an effort to get something passed of substantial impact this year.  And that’s the point – this year.  The conversation it opens, and we might add actually opened at the policy committee level as more tutorial than bill vetting, is in sync with so much else that suffuses the moment in water law, legislation, regulation, and just plain discussion.

While the details of both are complicated, suffice it to conclude, as have most legal and academic analyses, that AB 460 and SB 389 would undermine existing legal protections for pre-1914 and riparian water rights and result in significant changes to how California’s water rights system are administered – rights and arrangements as sacred and established if not more firmly established than parallel rights and arrangements held by California in the Colorado Compact. 

Click here to read the 8-page “Adapting Water Rights to our 21st Century Climate” document that was used by the Water Parks & Wildlife Committee to introduce AB 460 to the members at their February 28 “informational hearing.”  It’s a veritable rewrite of much of California’s water law. 

Whether the Colorado Basin or certain longstanding water rights, the facts on the climatological ground are going to increasingly govern who gets what when and how than rights accorded and laws firmly established in a past that has been overtaken by new realities.  The process promises to be painful and acrimonious to say the least, but golf fails to pay close heed and engage in the discussion at its great peril. 

Engage in the discussion and get proactively involved at every level thereof, that is.  And while we’re at it, perhaps use the reprieve Mother Nature has blessed us with and the surcease from virulent anti-golf legislation that last year’s successful AB 1910 has earned us to take a hard look at just how well prepared the game is to deal with the “fundamental” challenges that remain so firmly in place. 

The California Alliance for Golf (CAG) is pleased to announce the organization was
named recipient of the National Golf Course Owners Association (NGCOA) Champion
Award.

This award is bestowed upon individuals or entities who’ve succeeded in working on
behalf of a group of owners – locally, regionally, nationally, or internationally – and have
garnered significant victory for the golf industry. In 2022, through its advocacy efforts,
the Alliance was successful in helping defeat California Assembly Bill 672 and
Assembly Bill 1910, proposed legislation that would have converted California public
golf courses into housing projects. A successful awareness and letter writing campaign
to legislative leaders throughout the state proved to be beneficial.

Accepting the prestigious industry award was CAG Legislative Committee Chair Craig
Kessler, Director of Government Relations for the Southern California Golf Association
(SCGA), who was on hand at the awards ceremony held in conjunction with the 2023
Golf Business Conference in Orlando, FL.

Click here to view a video produced by the NGCOA highlighting the work of the
California Alliance for Golf.

Each year, the NGCOA recognizes the most outstanding members of the past year, and
the individuals and organizations that have helped preserve the tradition of the game
while embracing the challenges and opportunities of the golf business.
“All the nominees put forth this year are exceptional examples of our industry’s finest,”
said Tom Brooks, President of the NGCOA Board of Directors. “The winners exemplify
their importance to their community, and our sport and industry. We proudly
congratulate those who were selected for this year’s NGCOA awards.”

Also receiving the Champion Award in 2023 was U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) for
his involvement in the establishment of the Paycheck Protection Program.

Article provided by Craig Kessler, SCGA

Tuesday, February 21, 2023

Not all of the 19^th Century rules governing the rhythms of California’s legislative session are without value. The one requiring that bills must sit idle for a minimum of 30 days after filing is one of them. This gives everyone plenty of time to sift through the roughly 2,500 bills that were filed for consideration this session, most of which were filed within 10 days of last Friday’s deadline.

Upon completion of our “sift,” we’ll have a solid idea not only of which bills to track, but also which bills among those have traction. Many of the 2,500 filings are more performative than substantive, although today’s performance is often positioning for tomorrow’s traction. And that too merits tracking in terms of paying close heed to the arguments raised and the arguers who raise them.

Here are the early returns from Friday’s deadline. We are sure to find more in the coming week.

AB-363 Pesticides: neonicotinoids for nonagricultural use: reevaluation: regulations. [Bauer-Kahan; D-San Ramon]
This bill would require the department, by July 1, 2024, to publish a reevaluation of the latest science regarding the impacts of neonicotinoid pesticides, as defined, on pollinating insects, aquatic ecosystems, and human health when used for the nonagricultural protection of outdoor ornamental plants, trees, and turf, and, by July 1, 2026, to adopt regulations governing that use that are necessary to protect the health of honeybees, native bees, and other pollinating insects, aquatic ecosystems, and human health, as provided. [Click here to read a PDF version of the entire bill]

A stronger bill in terms of outright banning the use of neonicotinoids for nonagricultural use was vetoed by Governor Newsom last year. His veto message expressed concern about circumventing the state’s regulatory process while the Department of Pesticide Regulation was considering new regulations pertaining to both agricultural and nonagricultural uses.

Although the pollinators the bill aims to protect do not feast on turf, neonics do play a role in golf course turf management. Their loss would leave a hole in the game’s pest control toolbox. However, their use in golf is much more akin to the agricultural application that is being exempted than it is to the urban/suburban backyard use that would seem to be the aim of the bill’s co-sponsor Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). The Golf Course Superintendents Association of America (GCSAA) did make this point in its veto plea to Governor Newsom. Whether that plea proved dispositive, or part of a greater compelling argument from similarly situated sectors, may remain to be seen in the 2023 legislative session, where no doubt GCSAA and its allied partners within the California Alliance for Golf (CAG) will make the same plea for a parallel exemption for a golf course use restricted to licensed applicators and more closely regulated than required by current practice. It’s important to note that CAG is not opposed to restrictions upon neonicotinoids; it merely questions a blunderbuss approach that ensnares harmless applications.

AB-1572 Potable water: nonfunctional turf. [Friedman; D-Burbank]
This bill would make legislative findings and declarations concerning water use, including that the use of potable water to irrigate nonfunctional turf is wasteful and incompatible with state policy relating to climate change, water conservation, and reduced reliance on the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta ecosystem. The bill would direct all appropriate state agencies to encourage and support the elimination of irrigation of nonfunctional turf with potable water. This bill would prohibit the use of potable water, as defined, for the irrigation of nonfunctional turf located on commercial, industrial, municipal, institutional, and multifamily residential properties, as specified.

This is one of two bills (AB 1573 in addition) that Assembly Member Friedman has filed to make clear the state’s desire to phase out the use of potable water to irrigate those categories of turf deemed nonfunctional. As part of the class of “Special Landscape Areas (SLA’s),” golf along with parks, sports fields, and cemeteries are considered “functional” turf.

AB 1573 clearly maintains this, stating emphatically, “Nonfunctional turf” means turf that is solely ornamental and not regularly used for human recreational purposes or for civic or community events. Nonfunctional turf does not include sports fields and turf that is regularly used for human recreational purposes or for civic or community events.”

However, AB 1572 makes special reference to one longtime member of the SLA class in a way amenable to interpretation as opening others to excision: “Nonfunctional turf” means any turf that is not located in areas designated by a property owner or a government agency for recreational use or public assembly. Nonfunctional turf does not include turf located in cemeteries.

As a sector defined in too many minds as too much land that uses too much water to serve the too few who have had too much for too long, golf would be wise to take note of this potential opening and recognize that in a Capitol sure to be consumed with a permanent loss of Colorado River allocation, there may be legislators keen to consider excising certain disfavored members of the current SLA Class. We don’t suggest that Laura Friedman is in that group. She harbors no hostility toward the California golf community; indeed, she has been warm to golf. But given the moment, the environmental community’s strong support of these bills, palpable hostility to golf among a minority of legislators, and the increasing realization that Mother Nature not only didn’t but isn’t capable of bailing out a long overallocated Colorado Basin in the throes of its worst drought in 1,500 years – well, suffice it to say golf beware.

Click here to read AB 1572. Click here to read AB 1573.

SB-423 Land use: streamlined housing approvals: multifamily housing developments. [Wiener; D-San Francisco]

This bill would authorize the Department of General Services to act in the place of a locality or local government, at the discretion of that department, for purposes of the ministerial, streamlined review for development on property owned by or leased to the state. The bill would delete the January 1, 2026, repeal date, thereby making these provisions operative indefinitely.

This bill would modify the above-described objective planning standards, including by deleting the standard that prohibits a multifamily housing development from being subject to the streamlined, ministerial approval process if the development is located in a coastal zone, and by providing an alternative definition for “affordable housing costs” for a development that dedicates 100% of units, exclusive of a manager’s unit or units, to lower income households. The bill would, among other modifications, delete the objective planning standards requiring development proponents to pay at least the general prevailing rate of per diem wages and utilize a skilled and trained workforce and would instead require a development proponent to certify to the local government that certain wage and labor standards will be met, including a requirement that all construction workers be paid at least the general prevailing rate of wages, as specified. [Click here to read the Legislative Counsel’s Summary. The bill is excruciatingly detailed; those with such appetite can click here to read the full bill]

This bill, for which there is a companion version in the Assembly from Buffy Wicks (D-Oakland, Chair of Housing Committee), promises to be one of the most scrutinized and consequential bills in the 2023 hopper. The way we would boil down its 39 pages is as follows. The controlling piece of legislation regarding the incentivization of affordable housing, SB 35, also authored by Senator Wiener, has proven nettlesome in part due to what developers find two key obstacles: 1) A too high percentage “affordable” requirement, and 2) a set of labor standards that make “affordability” unattainable. SB 423 purports to solve the 2^nd obstacle in a way that renders the 1^st obstacle moot. While it has secured the endorsement of some sectors of California’s labor community, most notably the Carpenters, it has thus far incurred the opposition of the Building Trades, presaging in our view a replay of last year’s drama concerning Buffy Wicks’ AB 2011, which managed at the last minute to find the sweet spot of common ground to earn the support of the Building Trades and become law – in the minds of many political commentators and soothsayers an epochal achievement that contains the promise of actually constructing housing in this housing starved state.

While we don’t see or anticipate any direct assaults on California’s golf stock like AB 672 or 1910 in this session and are gratified that Cristina Garcia’s old Assembly District is now represented by Blanca Pacheco (D-Downey), a member of the Latina Golfers Association, we trust you understand the wisdom in tracking any and all bills that take control over planning decisions away from local cities and repose them in Sacramento – and repose them by right per the truncated permitting processes euphemistically referred to as “ministerial.”

Golf cannot escape nor much mitigate its encumbrance of large swaths of contiguous land in precisely those urban/suburban enclaves ripe for housing. Any who doubt just how critical the state deems its housing shortage need only read the state’s latest report card. Bills like SB 423 are going to keep coming quickly and furiously for as long as Californians of all stripes, locations, and political affiliations identify housing as their number one concern. So are the bills that keep moving housing up and open space/recreation down in the Surplus Land Act’s assignments of priority.

While golf can prevent being singled out among the many other land uses also ripe for housing, it cannot stop the stampede toward those obviations of local control and those assignments of priority capable of breaking the logjam that has long prevented the state from meeting its residents’ housing needs, albeit if California keeps hemorrhaging 500,000 souls, we may be closer to meeting our housing needs than we think. Of course, there are serious consequences to any city, region, or state that becomes hollowed out.

What golf can do is everything within its power to make real a community value proposition not founded on an economic metric guaranteed to make a compelling case for housing and other commercial uses, otherwise known as the traditional economic impact report (spoiler alert: Golf lags far behind other uses in terms of employment generation, tax generation, and economic multiplier effects), but founded upon the many quality of life, quality of environment, and quality of community values the game uniquely provides the places in which golf courses are located.

Call us foolish if you like but as persons responsible for getting results in a rather tough environment, we find it wise to lead with strengths, not weaknesses, albeit we do very much take our weaknesses into account with every strength we project.

The California Legislative Information website offers the general public the full text of bills, resolutions, and constitutional amendments, and their status, history, votes, analyses, and veto messages if applicable. The website is updated every day at 4:00am and 9:00pm. Please click here to continue staying informed.