BELLA VISTA — Did you read the article in the Aug. 26 issue of The Weekly Vista about the U.S.

Golf Association representative’s visit to our golf courses? (Note: A similar story appeared in the October issue of The Village Voice.)

Doug Grant’s write-up contained a lot of information and advice for Bella Vista Village’s golfing community. The most telling data was Golf Maintenance Manager Casey Crittenden’s comments on the age of the irrigation systems at the village’s golf courses.

Just consider the numbers: 44, 38, 34, 26, 26, 21 and 10.

Those are the number of years the irrigation systems have been installed.

Before, or after, you think, “So what,” consider the fact that golf irrigation systems pump far more water far more frequently at substantially higher pressures than your house and sprinkler systems.

If you are thinking that house plumbing lasts 50 years, so what’s the big deal, don’t go there. For starters, your home’s system operates strictly on water pressure from the main pipe in the ground in front of or behind your house.

Secondly, your system covers less than a quarter of an acre in most cases. Your daily water consumption runs in the hundreds of gallons range.

Golf course irrigation systems require one or more pump houses and cover upward of 400 acres. A typical system will use anywhere from 21 to 24 miles of pipe - that is more than 120,000 feet of pipe.

Approximately 60 percent of the pipe is 2 inches in diameter, but the rest of the pipe will be from 3 to 12 inches. Sometimes 1-inch and 16-inch diameter pipes are needed. The pump station intake from the well is usually from a 30-inch diameter pipe. Remember, golf courses are not allowed to use potable water, so one or more wells must be built.

In addition to the pipe, the system has about 3,000 fittings that have to be installed on the pipe for change of direction and attaching sprinkler heads.

About 265 miles - anywhere from 1.2 million to 1.5 million feet - of wire must be installed underground in order to provide electric power. This wire maze includes 12- and 14-gauge wires to all of the heads, including the communication wire from the central computer system, which is located at the superintendent’s office, and the large wire that powers the controllers. There are also about 2,500 wire splices on the systems.

Your house uses the same wire sizes, just nowhere near the amount.

In terms of hydrodynamics, the system maintains a pressure of about 110 psi.

This means that all piping is pressurized at all times in the range of 100 to 110 psi, as there is some pressure loss between the pump house and the sprinkler head.

In many locations, a golf course will use between 350,000 to 475,000 gallons of water per night, or in the range of 2.4 million to 3.3 million gallons of water each week, so any comparison with your house plumbing is fallacious.

Our two oldest irrigation systems are at the Bella Vista Country Club Golf Course and the Kingsdale Golf Complex, which consists of the Berksdale and Kingswood golf courses. As stated in a Sept. 16 article in The Weekly Vista, the cost to modernize the Bella Vista Country Club Golf Course’s irrigation systemwill exceed $1 million. Multiply that cost by three to include the other aforementioned golf courses. We are looking at a cost close to $4 million to update our three most popular courses.

We need to modernize these three systems during the next three to five years.

How are we going to pay for this major expense?

We are at a crossroads.

The present volume of play does not support maintaining our eight golf courses, much less providing funding for million-dollar maintenance projects. Ten years ago, the number of golf rounds would have easily funded irrigation system modernization, but not today.

Many golfers will agree that increasing play by attracting more local golfers and more vacationing golfers is a top priority. We cannot attract more golfers if our courses are not in great shape.

No doubt my favorite critics, the vocal minority who are experts on everything, have already started screaming that Bella Vista Village’s golf courses are fine. For them, it is probably true. They don’t care about the barren spots, particularly in the rough at the Bella Vista Country Club Golf Course, or the weed encroachment. They do not care about the future of Bella Vista golf courses.

They are only interested in playing golf cheaply.

When the Joint Advisory Committee on Golf met with more than 20 golf groups and the Friends of the Highlands and listened to comments at the July JACG meeting, the No. 1 priority was clearly fixing the irrigation systems. Players recognized that having a quality golfing experience starts with having a comprehensive and efficient distribution of water.

The question remains: How will Bella Vista fund the modernization of three irrigation systems during the next five years?

The golf committee has suggested that the Bella Vista Country Club Golf Course irrigation system be financed with Bella Vista’s cash reserves, which are considerable at the moment. However, we cannot pull reserves every time an irrigation system needs to be modernized. As Property Owners Association Board Chairwoman Roberta Dale pointed out correctly in August at the board of directors meeting, the challenge is quantifying the amount of reserve funds needed to cover any possibility.

That is the $64,000 question. (If you do not understand the reference, ask your parents or grandparents.) * * *

I encourage you to attend golf committee meetings, which are held the second Wednesday of each month in Riordan Hall. From November through March, the meetings are held at 8:30 a.m.

Every attendee is given a chance to speak to the committee on whatever golf topic is important to them. It is your opportunity to inform us of your concerns, as well as maximize your information on golf-related issues.

* * *

Louis Adler is a member of the Bella Vista Property Owners Association’s Joint Advisory Committee on Golf.

Sports & Recreation, Pages 13 on 10/21/2009

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