The big news this week is the new Tiger Woods-designed golf course in the Mayflower development. The plan calls for two courses, but they will phase it and start with the Tiger Woods course, which is said to be the “longest and highest” in Utah. I’m not a golfer, but I guess that is good. It might also be the steepest. Looking at the topo map included in the press release, it looks like if you sliced your drive, the odds are pretty good the ball would roll all the way to Heber before it stopped. So it will be a challenging course. The views ought to be spectacular.
The golf courses will be private, because there clearly is a need for more private golf courses in the area. Membership will be limited to 500 people. With 36 holes, that works out to little better than 13 members per hole, spread over 36 holes. And that assumes that all 500 are present and golfing every day. If you have to ask what that costs, you clearly won’t be joining. But the website says the vacant lots range from $2.4 million to $4.5 million. That seems like a steal when you consider the golf course will have two “world-class comfort stations.”
This seems like a great opportunity to do some kind of water reuse project, collecting all the waste water from the Mayflower project (which isn’t producing any yet, but will generate a fair amount once things are up and running), treat it on site, and use the treated effluent to irrigate the golf courses instead of drinking water. Nevada has been doing that for decades. Utah is very slowly coming around to the idea of reusing some of the water we are running out of. But that isn’t the plan here.
A proposed law requiring golf courses disclose their water use was killed in the Legislature, apparently because they prefer not to know. The designs of the proposed golf courses aren’t known yet, but even with careful and efficient irrigation, 36 holes will be at least 250 to 300 acres, and that will take 500 to 600 acre feet of water. That’s about enough to supply the entire town of Kamas.
Water in Utah is owned by the state, and permits for using it are based on the idea of “beneficial use,” as well as when the use began. In the hierarchy of uses, drinking and sanitation are at the top, followed by growing food, then industrial uses that create jobs. Lately there has been a lot of discussion about whether private suburban lawns are really a beneficial use of water. Public recreation has always been considered beneficial use, whether it’s soccer fields, municipal parks and golf courses, or snow making. But it’s lower in the pecking order. Private recreation isn’t considered separately from a crowded municipal course. Maybe it should be.
Despite 150 years of water policy development, the overriding constant in the allocation of water in the West is that it flows towards money. In this case, we are assigning roughly one acre foot of water for each of the 500 members of the private club. That’s enough for the entire annual indoor usage of two single family homes, with a little left over. It seems like there is room for discussion of whether allocating a precious and finite public resource to an exclusive private golf community on the basis of the worthiness of the wallet instead of the public benefit makes sense. It’s something we ought to at least have a conversation about.
In other private golf news, a herd of elk has moved out of Parleys Canyon and set up a bivouac on the golf course at the Salt Lake Country Club. In addition to scrambling traffic on I-80 and Foothill Drive, they are trampling the golf course and pooping all over it. The biggest concern, however, is that most of the elk are not even social members of the club, and the golf course is for the exclusive use of full equity members. There will be meetings.
The Country Club elk are getting a lot of attention because it is unusual to have them right in Salt Lake City. It’s strange behavior. The wildlife that aren’t making news are the critters that are normally at my house in the winter. The deep snow has completely changed their patterns. The wildlife has essentially vanished. There’s hardly a magpie around this winter. I usually have a herd of deer wandering through the feedlot area between the south facing mountain and the river. You could set your watch by their 4 o’clock trek to the river.
Not this year. I haven’t seen a deer on the ranch in months. They are scavenging the backyards of Francis instead. The south facing mountains are usually pretty open, with a lighter snow pack and often days or even weeks of bare ground. This year, the snow cover is consistent and deep, and animals searching for something to eat are disappointed.
We still have a couple of months of typically pretty snowy weather ahead of us. The deer will be wishing they had a golf course to munch on.