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.”

Whether it was golf’s ability to kill AB 672 and AB 1910 so effectively in the last two legislative sessions or legislators’ realization that offering financial bounties to chop municipal parkland golf courses into housing complexes was a bad idea, this year’s legislative session has nothing resembling either bill.

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.

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

January 31 came and went without the seven (7) states that form the Upper and Lower Basins of the Colorado River Compact coming to agreement on how to cede enough of their extant river allocations to meet the federal government’s (U.S. Bureau of Reclamation) short-term 2023-2026 requirements.

As 2023 opens, there is some good news, some bad news, some interesting news, and some no news to report.

When the subject is golf in California, and that’s the subject of our concern, what happens at the national level has little impact. Most of what affects the game in California happens at the state, regional, and even much more so, the local level.

We haven’t reported much if at all on the following subject, but there is more at stake in California’s 2022 election than most have been led to believe

Yesterday four of California’s key water districts – Metropolitan Water District (MWD), Imperial Irrigation District (IID), Coachella Valley Water District (CVWD), and Palo Verde Irrigation District (PVID) – pledged to cede 400,000 acre-feet of their current allotments back to the Colorado River Basin.

The first Monday in October is a phrase synonymous with the beginning of the next session of the United States Supreme Court, which much like the last session, promises to be a substantive one.