With 9 days to go before next week’s big “Golf & Water Summit” there are more than two hundred persons signed up with a waiting list to accommodate the overage – a powerful testament to the importance the Southern California golf community places on all matters water.

As most of you are painfully aware, effective June 1, Southern California’s Metropolitan Water District (MWD) issued some dramatic conservation mandates to those of its 19 million customers (MWD is the purchaser/provider of imported water for 26 Southern California Water Districts) dependent entirely upon the state water project for their imported sources.

“If the state says the drought is over, act like it’s not. We’re doing a good job, but we need to live under a permanent state of water conservation because water is the final frontier – especially with aridification in the western United States.”

It's worse than 2016. It’s not worse for everybody, not yet anyway. And it’s never as bad in the Coachella Valley as it is virtually elsewhere in Southern California, although convincing Sacramento of that can sometimes be a losing proposition.

When we counseled “concern, not panic” regarding recent headlines about water allocation curtailments, we didn’t mean to diminish the seriousness of the moment; we meant only to assuage the many of you who read those headlines and concluded that golf courses in certain areas of the Southland, most particularly Ventura County, the San Fernando Valley, and parts of the San Gabriel Valley, would be restricted to irrigating one day a week come June 1.

Many of you have read today’s headlines about yesterday’s announcement by the Metropolitan Water District (MWD) that the purchaser of water that serves 19 million Southern Californians has taken the unprecedented step of declaring a “water emergency” and ordering outdoor water usage be restricted to one day per week.

Because those of you who subscribe to these “Updates” follow the news closely, you likely know that earlier today Governor Newsom issued a multi-pronged Executive Order calling upon the state’s urban water providers to activate 2^nd level (20%) drought contingency plans, consider bans on the irrigation of all “ornamental” turf, and limit permits for groundwater extraction in certain basins.

SCGA’s “Save Public Golf” campaign – “save” it from the Public Golf Endangerment Act (AB 672) – rolled out phase 1 last week with an E-blast to its membership, an “SCGA News” spot, a “Club Digest” offering, and a social media campaign. All points leading to the “Save Public Golf” landing page on the Association website homepage -- Public Golf Endangerment Act -- a landing page that allows persons to type in their name and be immediately directed to their Assembly and Senate members along with a few sample letters that can be easily copied and pasted into those members’ E-mail portals. So far, so good in terms of member engagement and use thereof.

Immediately after Assembly Member Cristina Garcia (D-Bell Gardens) amended what we are now calling the “Public Golf Endangerment Act” to transform it from a politically clumsy bill into what we immediately termed a much more politically palatable and thus saleable bill, the gist of which became the addition of $50 million in financial incentives to chop 22% of the state’s golf stock into housing, SCGA informed its 185,000 members of that fact – something we have continued to do in the 60 days since through various different communication portals, all in an attempt to set the stage for engaging rank-and-file golfers to find it in their personal interest to let their legislators know what they think of singling golf and ONLY golf out among the state’s myriad open space/recreational activities for chopping up into housing tracts.

As the statewide golf community prepares to cope with the twin onslaughts of drought and a bill that proposes to chop 22% of California’s golf courses into residential developments (AB 672 – Garcia; D-Bell Gardens), we’d like to take a moment to put what will necessarily be some very tactical short-term responses into an overarching strategy capable of getting beyond tactical reaction toward strategic proactivity.