From tee to greenspace

For the people of Anaconda, Mont., Old Works Golf Course is nothing less than a miracle. For the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, it is a Superfund success story of the highest order.

But for thousands of golfers from across the country, it is just 7,000-plus yards of scenic territory. Unless they are particularly curious, they will never know that they are playing on land that, 10 years ago, would not have supported a dandelion, let alone the acres of grass, native vegetation and wildlife habitat to which it is home today.

Anaconda was named for an Australian mining company whose nearby Butte copper mine had been on environmentalists’ hit list for years. The city served as the site for the company’s copper smelter.

Anaconda suffered the usual effects of copper production: Smoke from the smelter hung in the air, while arsenic and the other by-products of the smelting process contaminated the soil, making the area look like a moonscape. “Nothing would grow here,” says Carl Stetzner, chief executive of the combined government of Anaconda and Deer Lodge County.

Owned by the county and run by the Anaconda/Deer Lodge County Golf Course Authority, Old Works has transformed the site and the city. Though it is still rattled by the ups and downs of the mining industry, Anaconda’s economy is stabilizing, a fact Stetzner attributes to the course. He says the upswing in the local tourist business has helped stem the worker exodus that began when the smelter closed down. (Many local residents also worked in the Butte mine, which recently closed.)

Ironically, a golf course turned out to be the least expensive method of reusing the devastated land. And Atlantic Richfield (ARCO), the company that had purchased the land from Anaconda six years before its Superfund designation, was looking for a cheap way out. In a series of meetings with EPA and the community, the company determined that hauling away the mine tailings and slag and rubble piles would present an enormous expense. Capping the whole mess, on the other hand, would cost less and offer more reuse opportunities.

Anaconda lucked out on the financing. Because it was to be located on a Superfund site, the golf course cost the city nothing; funds for the remediation came from ARCO and the federal government. However, again because it was a Superfund site, the course had to be carefully designed to eliminate any possibility of additional environmental damage. (Jack Nicklaus was the designer; the golf course’s architect was Bruce Borland, who died in the 1999 plane crash that killed pro golfer Payne Stewart.)

The design took advantage of the area’s natural features, which include Warm Springs Creek, and it incorporated old smelter debris, including flues, smelting ovens and brick walls. Bunkers made use of piles of inert black slag. Four hundred trees were planted during course construction.

Contaminated soil was capped with two inches of lime rock and 16 inches of clay soil, then covered with six to eight inches of topsoil and turf. A complex subsurface drainage system protects against damage from an irrigation pipeline break.

“They turned a Superfund site into a magnificent golf course,” Stetzner says. “It’s quite a story.”

It is a story that is being repeated in cities and counties across the country – without the Superfund angle. Golf courses are becoming the makeup that covers a multitude of environmental sins, popping up on top of old landfills, helping to protect shorelines and providing a solution to stormwater problems. The fact that they also provide a reliable revenue stream is icing on the cake.

Environmental stewardship

Golf courses have long been criticized by the environmental community as artificial, heavy-handed uses of the land. Seen as expensive playgrounds for the wealthy, they were castigated for everything from using dangerous pest management programs to contributing to the degradation of local water sources.

Interestingly, the environmental movement was peaking just as was the general interest in golf. The country needed more courses to satisfy the hundreds of thousands of new players. (Private golf facilities outnumbered public facilities prior to 1950, according to “An Environmental Approach to Golf Course Development,” written by Bill Love, environmental chairman for the American Society of Golf Course Architects. By 1990, the number of daily fee and municipal courses for public use was almost double that of private facilities.)

Cities and counties that wanted to build new golf facilities could not afford to anger community groups set on the protection of the local environment. Reusing damaged land and creating courses that would serve as environmental amenities were ways to resolve conflict.

“Environmental stewardship is the responsibility of every governing body,” Love says. “Golf courses represent great opportunities to practice it.”

“Environmental concern is not going to go away,” says Mike Hurdzan of Columbus, Ohio-based Hurdzan-Fry Golf Course Design. “When you are thinking about building a golf course, it has to be part of the planning process.”

Coming from Hurdzan, that is not just lip service. He designed one of the country’s most environmentally friendly courses: Widow’s Walk in Scituate, Mass. Like Old Works, Widow’s Walk has a number of admirers in environmental circles.

In fact, Widow’s Walk, which is owned by the town, was a national demonstration project. The course was built on land purchased in the early `70s from Boston Sand and Gravel, which mined gravel for Logan Airport runways. The city bought 500 acres and then proceeded to weigh its options. “The area had been used as a dumping ground for everybody,” says Scituate Town Manager Rick Agnew. “It was an eyesore. And it was adjacent to the town’s landfill.”

While Scituate officials were deciding what to do with the land, Hurdzan was meeting with a group of golf and environmental advocates to discuss the two groups’ “goals, similarities and dissimilarities” with regard to golf courses. The meeting was sponsored by the Center for Resource Management, a Salt Lake City-based non-profit organization dedicated to improving relationships between business and environmental groups; the Vienna, Va.-based National Wildlife Federation; Golf Digest; and Pebble Beach, Calif.

The group had three goals: to write a set of environmental principals for U.S. golf courses; to better educate golfers about the need for environmental concern; and to put together an environmental demonstration project using a golf course. (It chose two demonstration projects: Scituate for construction of a new course and the golf course at San Francisco’s Presidio for a renovation.) “I went to the town and said, `we should do this,'” Hurdzan says. “`Here’s a chance to work toward higher goals and principals. You will distinguish yourselves.'”

Scituate embraced the project. Working with Hurdzan and the Center for Resource Management, the town turned 140 acres of old gravel pit into a showplace. Widow’s Walk was built to survive with less water and fewer herbicides and pesticides than most courses. It is the only course Agnew knows of with three different types of greens. “The average golfer wouldn’t know the difference,” Agnew says. “I can’t tell one from the other.” The course also makes use of recycled asphalt for its cart paths and recycled carpet for its bunkers.

Widow’s Walk was a challenge, Hurdzan says, not because of the complexity of the environment – “there was almost no environment there,” he says – but because the town’s golfers and environmentalists did not trust each other. “Government officials distrusted the environmentalists, and the environmentalists distrusted the town,” he says.

Hurdzan made it clear that the project was doomed without a full buy-in. Telling town officials “it can’t be us against them,” he convinced them to compromise. “The grass is not green all year long,” he says. “We try to use less than half the amount of pesticides you would normally use on a golf course. That means the course will go through more natural cycles. It’s not going to be a classic golf course mowed from fence row to fence row. There’s going to be some slow play, some lost golf balls.”

The tradeoff is a golf course rich with wildlife habitat. Designers produced a corridor of mixed habitats including open ponds, wetlands, vegetated streams, woods, open grassy areas and vernal pools. The course is irrigated with water from abandoned drinking wells that no longer meet EPA standards, making it somewhat of a biofilter.

From garbage to greens

Because they involve vast expanses of land that is unsuitable for most other uses, landfills are often reborn as golf courses. However, the transformation often is a tricky proposition since it involves EPA regulations, capping and provisions for protection of groundwater. Perhaps even more importantly, landfills are rarely located near significant pockets of golfers.

That was the case in Chicago when the Illinois International Port District decided to turn two of its landfills into golf courses. Unfortunately for the Port District, the two landfills – one sanitary and one for construction and demolition debris – were in an industrial area on the city’s south side, which is not exactly its demographic golf hub. “You’d look in the distance and see the industrial underbelly of the Midwest,” says course designer Tim Nugent of Long Grove, Ill.-based Nugent Golf Associates.

To attract the golfers necessary to help the district return an operating profit, Port District board members realized that the new courses would have to be “world class.” Harborside International Golf Center was their answer. The center features two 18-hole championship courses, a 58-acre practice facility and a golf academy.

Nugent and his father, Dick, built Harborside in two stages, working on the sanitary landfill portion while the C&D landfill remained open. Tipping fees from that landfill helped finance construction of the first portion.

The sanitary landfill was capped with clay from a dredging project in Lake Calumet. Because of the area’s flat topography, the course was “built in the air,” as Nugent says. “We built all the hills and bunkers in the air and then filled up to them,” he explains. “We had a contractor who called and said, `There’s a big mistake in your plans.’ We said, `What’s that?’ And he said we had a catch basin that was 10 feet high. We told him, `No, that’s right. We’re gonna fill up to it.'”

The 250 acres that comprised the C&D landfill were 30 feet lower than the 220 that made up the sanitary landfill, so filling was necessary there, too. However, capping was not required since the site had held no organic debris. It did contain acres of construction debris, with which the designers were forced to work. “It had everything in it – bridge abutments, concrete beams, rebar sticking up, you name it,” Nugent says. “It looked pretty nasty.”

The courses’ fairways, greens and bunkers were built using sludge (in combination with other material) that would normally have gone into the landfill. The Nugents also cut a deal with Portage, Ind., which had a surplus of sand, trading excess clay for sand to help fill out the fairways. “[The fairways] are almost as nice as the greens,” Nugent says. (The Nugents also managed to scrounge up the material for their roads, parking lots and cart paths, cutting a deal for old pavement with the contractor that was rebuilding Chicago’s Kennedy Expressway.)

Because of the use of sludge, stormwater runoff had to be contained on site. Harborside’s extensive drainage system involves seven dry detention locations that store water before it is sent to a sewage treatment plant for processing. Finally, new wetlands were created on the site, and existing ones were upgraded.

The means to an end

When they are built on damaged land, golf courses provide obvious environmental benefits. Less obvious are the opportunities for environmental enhancement on existing courses.

Lansing, Mich., recognized its opportunity when the city was forced by EPA to separate its sanitary and storm sewer systems. The city was looking at a $20 million project to run a line to the river until the less expensive alternative of building retaining ponds was broached.

Groesbeck Municipal Golf Course, in need of renovation anyway, was chosen as the site for the retaining pond system. Nine of the course’s 18 holes were to be renovated; six of those would be affected by the construction of the ponds. The challenge was to redesign the holes to include the new water features without requiring additional land.

John Johnson, the city’s golf maintenance supervisor, calls the result “a stunning success, not just from an environmental standpoint but from an [aesthetic] standpoint.” The course is now part of a 30-acre wetlands system that can handle 10 million gallons of water per day, the equivalent of that dumped in back-to-back 25-year storms. Additionally, the ponds provide irrigation for the entire 18-hole course through operation of an underground recirculating system that exchanges the water in the ponds every 24 hours.

Groesbeck has been state-certified under the Michigan Environmental Stewardship Program, a joint effort of Michigan State University and the state Department of Environmental Quality. “We’ve always been environmentally sensitive,” Johnson says. “This was a good way to show that.”

Johnson marvels at the wildlife that has gathered at Groesbeck since the renovation. “We never put any fish or reptiles in the ponds, and they’re loaded with them,” he says. “We’ve got bullfrogs the size of my fist, migratory geese, ducks by the hundreds. We’re centrally located in Lansing. It’s very urban. But we’ve got deer, fox, woodchucks and muskrats. I saw an albino deer one morning. I thought it was someone’s Great Dane.”

Johnson is an enthusiastic proponent of golf courses as environmental assets. “My father was a soil conservationist,” he says. “I was raised to think about the environment. When I speak to groups, I can spot people right away who have a chip on their shoulders about golf courses. I tell them I use less pesticides per acre than most homeowners use on their lawns.”

Not a passing fad

“Golf is a game of honor, and it is simply proper that it do everything possible to remain in harmony with our planet.” So says Paul Thomas of EPA’s Region 5 Water Division in the forward to Love’s book on environmental golf course design. It is also a good way for cities and counties to generate revenue. In the past, the two ideas – being in harmony with the planet and making money – were seen as mutually exclusive.

In fact, failing to take environmental concerns into consideration is no longer an option for cities and counties bent on building golf courses. “This is not a passing fad,” Hurdzan says. “And it’s going to become more and more important. Technology is helping, with the development of newer grasses that use less water and fertilizer, organic approaches to turf care and the use of compost and effluent water.”

The course designers are aware that there will always be those opposed to golf courses as a matter of principle. They are equally convinced that most golf course opponents will become advocates once they are presented with reliable information. “The first thing you do [with the opponents] is engage them in the discussion,” Hurdzan says.

“Usually I find that what people think is a special environmental situation is not necessarily special,” Love says. “We can work through it.”

The trick, he says, is to separate the people with genuine environmental concerns from the people who couch no-growth attitudes in environmental rhetoric. Cities and counties need to be able to identify the former and work with them to create courses that are environmental – and financial – success stories.