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 22, 2023

In light of the Lower Basin states’ conservation proposal, the Biden Administration has announced that it is temporarily withdrawing the draft Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement (SEIS) published last month so that it can fully analyze the effects of the proposal under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). The United States Bureau of Reclamation will then publish an updated draft SEIS for public comment with the consensus-based proposal as an action alternative. Accordingly, the original May 30, 2023, deadline for the submission of comments on the draft SEIS is no longer in effect. The Department plans to finalize the SEIS process later this year.

The Arizona/California/Nevada proposal commits the three states to conserve at least 3 million-acre-feet of system water through the end of 2026, when the current operating guidelines are set to expire. Of those system conservation savings, 2.3-million-acre feet will be compensated through funding from last December’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which provided substantial monies to the three states to increase near-term water conservation, build long term system efficiency, and prevent the Colorado River System’s reservoirs from falling to critically low elevations that would threaten water deliveries and power production. Under this proposal, the remaining system conservation needed for sustainable operation will be achieved through voluntary, uncompensated reductions by the Lower Basin states.

Early next month, the federal government will formally advance the process for the development of new operating guidelines replacing the 2007 Colorado River Interim Guidelines for Lower Basin Shortages and the Coordinated Operations for Lake Powell and Lake Mead at the end of 2026. In the coming weeks, expect to see a Notice of Intent for the Environmental Impact Statement related to the post-2026 guidelines. With the three Lower Basin States having come to agreement on how to divvy up the savings necessary to protect the integrity of the Colorado Basin in the short run, both processes are going to proceed in tandem.

As we have been suggesting in all our reporting on this subject, the actions and statements of the three Reclamation States and the United States Government in recent months have all been about positioning themselves to come to precisely the consensus evidenced by today’s breakthrough. The precise details of that consensus – the amount of allocation ceded by each state and each agency within each state – remain to be worked out, but the outlines are clear for Southern California. The State Water Project allocation may be 100% for the first time in years, but we’ll be losing some of our Colorado River water between now and 2026, after which we may well lose even more. Given that golf’s portion of that loss will not be part of the “compensated” savings envisaged through federal largesse – you can fallow farmland; you can’t fallow golf courses – the need to keep reducing the game’s water footprint promises to become just that much more acute, as does the need for the game to make clear to policymakers that golf understands this fact to its very core.

Click here to read the joint letter filed today by the States of Arizona, California, and Nevada – a letter that was well enough received by the Biden Administration to cause the Bureau of Reclamation to withdraw the draconian SEIS it issued after January 31 came and went without agreement among the states on so much as a temporary salve to the Basin’s woes.

ST. AUGUSTINE, Fla. (May 16, 2023) – 82 grassroots golf organizations, charitable organizations or programs dedicated to increasing golf participation among those who are underrepresented in the sport, will receive a total of $750,000 in funding to further their efforts. These groups (*full list below) are being awarded grants through Make Golf Your Thing, the industry’s commitment to advancing diversity, equity and inclusion to help make the sport more welcoming for all.

The grant program to date has provided 237 grants to 137 unique grassroots organizations, totaling more $1.8 million (May 2021: 43 grants totaling $150,000; Jan. 2022: 31 grants totaling $150,000, June 2022: 81 grants totaling $750,000, May 2023: 82 grants totaling $750,000). The program was established to support organizations dedicated to increasing participation among golf’s underrepresented populations –Black, Latinx, Asian, Indigenous communities, as well as women, LGBTQI+ individuals, veterans, and individuals with disabilities.  

“Diversity, equity, and Inclusion must be woven into the fabric of the game,” said Jay Monahan, Commissioner of the PGA TOUR and executive sponsor of the Make Golf Your Game area of commitment for Make Golf Your Thing. “This is not an easy task, and it requires all of us to participate fully. The industry coming together to broaden the reach of our great game is positively impacting communities in way none of us can do alone.”

“Diversity, equity, and Inclusion must be woven into the fabric of the game,” said Jay Monahan, Commissioner of the PGA TOUR and executive sponsor of the Make Golf Your Game area of commitment for Make Golf Your Thing. “This is not an easy task, and it requires all of us to participate fully. The industry coming together to broaden the reach of our great game is positively impacting communities in way none of us can do alone.” 

Formally launched in May 2021, Make Golf Your Thing is the industry’s movement to diversify all aspects of the sport. The movement is organized into three strategic focus areas for increasing diversity: Make Golf Your Game (participants), Make Golf Your Career (industry employees), and Make Golf Your Business (industry suppliers). The grant program is an ongoing centerpiece initiative within Make Golf Your Game.

The application period for this fourth phase of funding saw a record 122 applications. Each application was reviewed by a team of 24 volunteers who have extensive experience in expanding grassroots golf organizations. Grantees were selected based on population served, leadership, programming offered, growth potential, and sustainability.

Funding for the grant program is being administered by the American Golf Industry Coalition, a partnership among golf’s leading organizations to promote and advocate for the collective interests of the sport. Financial support for the program is led by a contingent of industry supporters that are committed to making the sport more welcoming and inclusive for all.

About Make Golf Your Thing
Make Golf Your Thing is a collaborative effort that reflects the industry’s commitment to making the sport more diverse, equitable and inclusive. This multi-faceted, multi-year movement intentionally works to invite more people to golf from all backgrounds, identities and abilities, whether you are playing, building a career or doing business with the industry. 

About the American Golf Industry Coalition
The American Golf Industry Coalition advocates on behalf of golf’s diversity, equity and inclusion efforts; environmental and sustainability initiatives; contributions to the economy (local and national); health and wellness benefits, as well as charitable giving. The organization unites the golf industry in pursuit of goals designed to enhance the vitality and diversity of both the business and recreational levels of the sport. The American Golf Industry Coalition is a division of the World Golf Foundation. To learn more, visit www.golfcoalition.org.

Media Contact:
Morgan Comer
American Golf Industry Coalition
850-933-0115
mcomer@worldgolffoundation.org

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.