If you thought that the 2014 Sustainable Groundwater Management Act’s (SGMA) addition of yet another layer atop California’s and the Southwest’s already highly layered and complicated water law wasn’t going to result in a bevy of litigation to determine access to the commodity that Mark Twain quipped was “for fighting, not drinking,” you were naïve.

If you are a Los Angeles area public golfer trying to secure a tee time in a region identified by the National Golf Foundation (NGF) as the lowest concentration of golf per golfer in the Continental United States you have taken note that one of the mainstays you have relied upon for close to 100 years closed a few months ago – the Montebello Golf Course mere yards off the 60 Freeway just a few miles east of downtown Los Angeles.

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.

With COVID now behind us, no more bills like AB 1910 in the immediate offing, and the game’s drought response cum coping mechanisms in high gear, we plan to pivot back toward municipal golf in 2023.

The atmospheric rivers that began pummeling California right after Christmas have produced more than enough snow in the Sierra Nevada and rain everywhere else to provide relief to those parts of the state dependent upon Mother Nature and the State Water Project for the bulk of their water needs – not permanent relief, but a timeout to regroup after the three driest years on record.

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

As we suggested a few months ago, it was not a matter of whether but only of when the Metropolitan Water District’s (MWD) emergency drought order would be extended beyond the original 6 million state water project dependent customers that have been under severe restrictions since June 1 to the 13 million MWD customers with access to imports from both the state water project and the Colorado River Basin.

Our Northern colleagues conduct their version of a “golf & water summit” December 7 at Boundary Oak Municipal Golf Course in Walnut Creek.

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