Mission Hills CC Hosts 2023 Coachella Valley Golf & Water Summit

January 13, 2023


RANCHO MIRAGE, Calif. —It’s not a question of if …

Such was the message delivered Wednesday to over 150 members of the larger golf community – superintendents, head pros, vendors, suppliers – at the Coachella Valley Golf and Water Summit.

It’s only a question of how much. Federal water officials – the Bureau of Reclamation – have given the seven states and tribal nations that rely on Colorado River water until Jan. 31 to voluntarily accede to a demand that they lower the yearly draw on the river by 2- to 4-million acre-feet. If that sounds like a lot of water, it is. In climatological terms, it represents up to half of the average yearly allocation given to California, Nevada and Arizona combined. For all users and uses.

“Golf is really an important part of this community, and we recognize the economic value of it,” says Robert Cheng, Coachella Valley Water District assistant general manager. “However, there is a huge increased focus on water issues. This a supply versus demand imbalance, and the hydrology has not been cooperative in the Colorado River basin for the past couple of decades.”

In basic parlance, the faucet is too small and drain is too large. And while we are enjoying a bountiful (early) winter, a month of atmospheric rivers and (early) record snowpack is neither a guaranteed harbinger of the entire stockpiling season – winter and spring – nor, if it holds, an end to the historic drought gripping the West.

“People will see that it is a wet year, they are going to forget about the need to conserve, they are going to forget about the need for planning for the future,” Peter Nelson warns. “You’ll hear soon, ‘The drought is over, the drought is over.’ It’s not.” Nelson is a CVWD board member and not just an expert on regional water issues, but arguably the most knowledgeable person in California about ongoing negotiations among the seven states in the Colorado Compact and the federal government.

The symposium also included discussion of research efforts to develop high-efficiency irrigation systems and ever-more-drought-tolerant turfgrasses that do not require overseeding, the elimination of not-in-play turf, and altering the public perception that wall-to-wall green is the only “good” golf. And that then begs the question: How green does my green grass really need to be? The ancestral home of golf does just fine, thank you very much, when Mother Nature turns off the spigot. A new mantra is in order: Brown grass is not dead grass.

The SCGA and its summit partners – CVWD, USGA, Southern California PGA, Golf Course Superintendents Association of America – have been at the forefront of this problem with the mindset that participatory proactivity beats told-what-to-do reactivity.

As Craig Kessler, SCGA Public Affairs director, advises, “When you get an opportunity to get out ahead of a problem, take it.”

An ounce of prevention beats a gallon of cure, and notably when that “cure” is administered from on high.

The SCGA will continue to follow this important matter and report on it in the months ahead.



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