Tim Harty, The Business Times

The United States Golf Association in late March sent out its Water Conservation Playbook, touting it as providing “the latest tools and techniques to more effectively manage water utilization.”

It has 211 pages that might come in handy in places that never experienced drought until recent years.

In the semi-arid, high-desert climate of the Grand Valley, however, the golf maintenance crews could teach classes at Ivy League universities about conserving water, using it responsibly and growing grass where the ground kicks and screams at the idea of something green sprouting from it.

Thanks for the playbook, USGA, but we got this.

Tim Tafoya, the director of golf for the City of Grand Junction, which owns Tiara Rado and Lincoln Park golf courses, said he perused the nine main practices and concluded, “We pretty much do all of them.”

Maxwell Weckerly, the director of golf at Golf Club at Redlands Mesa said he hasn’t seen the USGA Water Conservation Playbook, but he’s positive Redlands Mesa’s superintendent, Kass Severson, knows what he needs to know.

“It’s obviously a thing that here in Grand Junction and Western Colorado that everyone’s known about and worried about for years and years,” Weckerly said. “Ever since the (Redlands Mesa) course was built in 2001, I’m sure they were thinking about it then.

“We definitely have always done everything we can to conserve as much water as possible, like watering at night and being really strategic about how much water goes on different parts of the course and stuff like that. I don’t really know if we would change much, but we definitely will keep up with the good conservation that we already do.”

The USGA addresses irrigation-system maintenance, and that’s another thing Tafoya believes Tiara Rado and Lincoln Park have under control, calling it a constant part of the job.

“You’re always checking sprinkler heads. You’re always seeing rotation schedules. You’re always looking at exactly what’s going on,” he said. “When we start to grow grass, obviously, you’ll see the result if we missed a spot, or if the systems don’t work, especially in our climate, because it gets so hot, and then you’ll see some browned-out grass right away, a couple days to turn around if we missed a spot. 

So, it’s a constant part of the job.”

City of Grand Junction General Services Director Jay Valentine added the city made a conscientious effort in 2009 to address water infrastructure at its golf courses, replacing the irrigation systems at both, making the irrigation systems and pumps more efficient, plus building water storage at Tiara Rado.

That work makes implementing water-conservation measures possible.