SACRAMENTO – Fourteen leaders of the state’s golf community spent last Wednesday in California’s Capitol meeting with 21 separate legislative offices, including those of the Assembly Speaker’s and Senate Pro Tempore – meetings focused on those issues like water, land use, and environmental sustainability that are always atop the list of the game’s priorities, as well as specific bills of interest on this year’s legislative docket.
Among the organizations represented were the Southern California Golf Association (SCGA), Northern California PGA Section (NCPGA), Southern California PGA Section (SCPGA), California Golf Course Owners Association (CGCOA), California Chapter of the Golf Course Superintendents Association of America CA GCSAA), Latina Golfers Association (LGA), and San Francisco Public Golf Alliance (SFPGA).
“Unlike recent legislative sessions in which golf faced some problematic bills, we had with one exception the luxury of communicating our support of numerous bills at this year’s Capitol Day,” said California Alliance for Golf (CAG) President Len Dumas, PGA – most of them involving bills involving access to recycled water, water supply targets, investments in 21st Century storage technologies, and data collection methodologies better calibrated to the realities of a warming, drying climate that yields less water from both the State Water Project and the Colorado Basin.
Conservation is supply. A drop saved is a drop available for use when the state suffers consecutive years of drought as it did in 2020-2022. However, if conservation is the only tool in the state’s conservation toolbox, it’s hard to see how the state can continue remain the world’s 5th largest economy and even harder to see how those active recreational activities like golf can continue to grace the lives of Californians at the levels to which they have become accustomed.
The lone exception to CAG’s “support” theme involved SB 51 (Niello; R-Roseville), a bill that would reverse the California electorate’s 2018 expressed preference go to Daylight Saving Time year-round by going instead to permanent Standard Time – a preference expressed at the ballot box by a 24-point margin no less. This would be a significant blow to golf in California, both financially and programmatically, specifically junior and high school golf programming. But it would also be a blow to other active recreation programs, the state’s tourism industry, efforts to limit energy consumption, other sectors dependent upon daylight to ply their trades, and according to a 2015 study performed by the Brookings Institution, a blow to crime prevention as well. “Before making a change to something we have been doing for more than a century and making that change in direct contradiction of expressed public sentiment, a little more study than the limited ones cited by the bill’s proponents is in order,” said CAG Vice-President and CEO of the Southern California PGA Section Nikki Gatch, PGA.
To learn more about the California Alliance for Golf (CAG) visit www.cagolf.org.
- Craig Kessler, Executive Director