STATE’S LEGISLATIVE ANALYST ECHOES WATER PROVIDERS’ CRITICISMS OF SWRCB’S PROPOSED RULES

Wednesday, December 27, 2023

Article provided by Craig Kessler

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

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

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

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

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

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

Neither was the assessment of the LAO.

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

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

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

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

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

HOLIDAY MESSAGE

Wednesday, December 27, 2023

Article provided by Craig Kessler

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy Holidays. See you in the New Year.

CALIFORNIA ALLIANCE FOR GOLF ANNOUNCES ITS 2024 BOARD OFFICERS

DECEMBER 18, 2023

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

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

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

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

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

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

SPEAKER RIVAS MAKES HIS APPOINTMENTS

Monday, November 27, 2023

Article provided by Craig Kessler, SCGA

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DIRECT POTABLE REUSE GOOD FOR THE COLLECTIVE, A CHALLENGE FOR GOLF

Monday, October 20, 2023

Article provided by Craig Kessler, SCGA

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2023 LEGISLATIVE SESSION – FINAL WORD

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SB 525 – $25/hr. Healthcare workers.

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

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

SEPULVEDA BASIN “VISION PLAN”

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


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

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

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

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

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

“Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.”

Tuesday, October 17, 2023

Article provided by Craig Kessler, SCGA

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“MAKING CONSERVATION A CALIFORNIA WAY OF LIFE”

Monday, October 2, 2023

Article provided by Craig Kessler, SCGA

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


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

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

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

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

1.Developing new water supplies.

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

3.Reducing demand.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2023 LEGISLATIVE SESSION TELLS US MUCH ABOUT DIRECTION OF CALIFORNIA WATER LAW

Monday, September 18, 2023

Article provided by Craig Kessler, SCGA

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

WHAT ELSE THE 2023 SESSION TOLD US

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


# # # # # # # # # # #

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


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

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


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

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

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

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

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


# # # # # # # # # # #

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

When: Wednesday, September 20 @ 9:00 AM

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

No fee Lunch provided Parking validated

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

No fee Lunch provided Parking validated

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

SACRAMENTO UPDATE

Tuesday, September 5, 2023

Article provided by Craig Kessler, SCGA

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


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

To refresh your memories.

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

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

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

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

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

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

But first, another refresher.

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AB 1572
AB 1573
SB 389

SB 799

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


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

HEEDING LABOR’S ROAR

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.

INTERREGNUM

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.”

THOSE WHO THOUGHT IT WOULD BE ABOUT THE US OPEN LAST WEEK WERE REMINDED OTHERWISE BY THE LA TIMES

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.”

HALFTIME HAS ARRIVED IN SACRAMENTO

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 2nd 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.

# # # # # # # # # # #


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.

SACRAMENTO WATCH

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.

THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM

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.

Colorado Basin: What’s going On?

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 5th 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.

RECENT EVENTS ALLOW FOR REGROUPING NOT RESTING

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 20th 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 21st Century realities than the 20th Century infrastructure that is no longer capable of meeting the needs of a 40-million person state that represents the 5th 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 2nd 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. 

California Alliance for Golf Receives 2023 NGCOA Champion Award

Jay Karen, CEO of the NGCOA (left) and Tom Brooks, CGCS, President of the NGCOA (right) present the 2023 Champion Award to California Alliance for Golf representative Craig Kessler, SCGA Dir. of Governmental Affairs. The ceremony took place in conjunction with the association’s 2023 Golf Business Conference held in Orlando, FL.(Photo Credit: McLendon Photography)

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

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

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

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

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

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

2023 LEGISLATIVE SESSION – THE EARLY RETURNS

Article provided by Craig Kessler, SCGA

Tuesday, February 21, 2023

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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