They've promised to build a better golf course, one that keeps pesticides and fertilizers from seeping through the rolling fairways and manicured greens into the rocky crevices that feed the Edwards Aquifer recharge zone.
SAN ANTONIO — They've promised to build a better golf course, one that keeps pesticides and fertilizers from seeping through the rolling fairways and manicured greens into the rocky crevices that feed the Edwards Aquifer recharge zone.
That's the pledge by the PGA Tour and Lumbermen's Investment Corp. as they roll ahead with plans to open a world-class golf resort in North Bexar County by 2009.
Driven by public concern that the resort might threaten San Antonio's main source of drinking water, architects and engineers are devising an unusually stringent plan to build a clay barrier between the grass and soil -- and the aquifer below, in effect sealing it from harm.
The closest similar design might be one used by the Environmental Protection Agency when it builds golf courses over highly polluted Superfund sites.
Officials promise the ambitious plan will be one of the most protective in the country, combining a waterproof clay layer, a closed-loop irrigation system and water monitoring stations to keep pollutants from entering the aquifer.
Scott Halty, director of resource protection for the San Antonio Water System, said he's been unable to find another system like it anywhere in the country. Vernon Kelly, president of PGA Tour Golf Course Properties, said the system potentially will add millions of dollars to the club's price tag and goes far beyond anything the tour has installed at its 26 other Tournament Players Clubs.
Not surprisingly, given that the issue has been among the most contentious the city has seen in recent years, not everyone is convinced.
"I feel like our aquifer is the guinea pig for the project," said City Councilwoman Patti Radle, who cast the lone vote against the project. "Why would we go ahead and risk something like this?"
The last time Lumbermen's proposed building a golf resort and residential development on the 2,855-acre parcel in North Bexar County, more than 100,000 residents signed a petition asking that the public be allowed to vote on the project.
No similar effort has been mounted this time. The anti-pollution plan and other protections promised by developers have been enough to convince 10 of 11 City Council members the project is environmentally sound.
"I think the argument is that this is definitely better than anything that is not monitored and has higher impervious cover," said council member Art Hall. "I know they have never built this before, but I'm sure they are getting the right engineers and consultants who have the knowledge."
PGA Tour planners still are developing the system for the two golf courses they will build, but Kelly said there is nothing cutting-edge or untried about it -- just the combination of technologies is new.
"We don't have any systems like this in place," he said. "That sounds like it's experimental. It's not experimental. The engineering has been used to a greater or lesser degree."
Closed-loop irrigation systems, which capture and reuse water on site, are commonly used in the golf industry to save water. La Cantera Golf Club, one of six courses already built over the recharge zone in the county, is a good nearby example. But it's difficult to find another course that uses a closed-loop system and was engineered to be sealed off from the groundwater below.
It's an attempt to completely cut off the golf courses from the recharge zone, a 1,500-square-mile area where water enters the aquifer through fractures, sinkholes and caves in the exposed limestone of the porous landscape.
"We don't believe there is anything like this out there," SAWS' Halty said. "There could be, but we couldn't find it."
Course architect Pete Dye, a veteran of more than 80 golf courses and 40 years in the field, said the design is pretty straightforward.
He estimated it will take roughly 75,000 cubic yards of clay -- about 5,000 dump truck loads -- to seal the course. The clay will be molded to the ground beneath at least 85 percent of irrigated areas, and maybe more. The course will then be built on top of that layer, with an irrigation system capable of retaining and recycling at least the first half-inch of rainwater from a storm.
Studies have shown that the first half-inch of storm water carries most of the pollution with it.
The Environmental Protection Agency, through its Superfund program, has used similar technology to turn a portion of an old smelter site in Anaconda, Mont., into a golf course. Crews there used a semi-pervious soil and a lime buffer to keep the course's water from seeping into the contamination below. They also put in miles of drains and irrigation pipes to keep most of the runoff on site.
However, because the course is in the middle of a contaminated Superfund site, EPA project manager Charles Coleman said it is hard to determine how successful the system is in preventing pollution.
Chicago offers more closely monitored examples.
Although they're not dead ringers, similar plans have been used in that area since the early 1990s to redevelop landfills into golf courses, said Joyce Munie with the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency.
Fueled by the high price of land, at least three Chicago landfills have been turned into golf courses, and a fourth is being converted. The process, Munie said, offers the challenge of keeping the course's irrigation water from seeping into the closed landfill below, and, in some cases, trapping the storm water on site to keep it from potentially fouling drinking wells.
The redevelopments have been successful, Munie said, in part because the engineering is not that difficult, particularly what is used to construct the storm water systems that catch and hold the water.
"You can design those things easily," she said. "Storm water retention basins and drainage systems are age-old engineering. They are very well understood and well designed. It's freshman engineering, basically."
One major difference between Chicago and San Antonio, Munie noted, is geology. Although groundwater contamination is a major concern in the Chicago area, the threats posed are nothing like that faced in San Antonio by the area's porous karst geology, she said.
In most places, rain passes through layers of sand or gravel that act as natural filters before it enters the underground water supply. But over San Antonio's recharge zone, a thin layer of grass and dirt has less ability to filter impurities. And when streets and houses concentrate the dirty rainwater into smaller portions of open land, it further weakens its filtering abilities.
Water experts say the recharge zone's natural ability to filter pollutants is compromised when the area covered by streets and houses -- the technical term is impervious cover -- exceeds 15 percent of the land's surface. That was one of the reasons Lumbermen's agreed to a 15 percent limit on this development. (The previous plan for a golf resort, proposed by Lumbermen's and PGA of America, not the PGA Tour, called for 25 percent.)
Although it will be lined with an impervious layer of clay, Lumbermen's is excluding the golf course from that 15 percent limit -- to the consternation of some opponents.
SAWS officials say that exclusion is fair because the 15 percent limit is designed to target hard surfaces that can collect grease, oil and other pollutants that rain can wash into the aquifer. The foot or so of turf and dirt over the clay offers enough natural filtration to be considered pervious.
George Veni, a local hydrogeologist and Edwards Aquifer expert, said one of the issues lost in the debate is that contamination -- small amounts of insecticides, herbicides and other manmade chemicals -- already have been found in the aquifer, but that there hasn't been research to determine the cause or effect.
That makes it impossible to estimate how much more pollution the aquifer can take before the water becomes truly fouled and requires filtering through a water treatment plant before it can be safely routed to area taps.
"The more we look, the more we find them," he said of the instances of pollution. "The aquifer itself is not contaminated, but there is contamination in the aquifer."
That's what worries people such as Graciela Sanchez, director of the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center, who will continue to cast a critical and suspicious eye at the project.
"What they presented us was the best that they thought they can do, but they have no history with this," she said. "We don't know for a fact that it is not going to leak. It's just going to be, 'Try it and see how it goes.'"
Cal Roth, director of the PGA Tour's golf course maintenance operations, doesn't think his new courses will add to the problem in any way. Even if major storms overflow the retention systems, he said the levels of chemicals and fertilizers will be monitored and modified to prevent contamination in the runoff.
"I'm not concerned about it, because I don't think that will be an issue," he said. "But just to be sure, that's why there's the monitoring program."
That program is the system's third and final line of defense against pollution. The job will fall to SAWS, although the developers will pay $100,000 a year for the service.
Water system crews have already installed a $20,000 monitoring station near a creek bed on the northern portion of the property and will install another roughly three miles south where the watershed leaves the site.
The idea is to test groundwater where it enters and leaves the property.
"One could reason that any change in the water quality happened somewhere in between," said Tim Howe, SAWS environmental compliance supervisor.
The irrigation lakes also will be sampled -- every other month for the first two years and once a quarter for the next four years. After that, SAWS will determine how often testing is needed.
Water system officials also will test wells on the site, which, because of the area's complex geology, hit the Trinity Aquifer, not the Edwards. Crews also will drill at least four more monitoring wells, including some into the Edwards, which lies under roughly the southern third of the property.
Pollution limits for the groundwater and surface water sampling are set at a fraction -- 20 percent and 30 percent -- of drinking water standards for nutrients and pollutants found in the chemicals used on the golf course. Any readings above that amount will trigger corrective action.
"The water system has gone all out for a good water monitoring program," Howe said. "Water sampling isn't done halfway. I want people to know that we take this thing seriously and we have the professional people that can do the job right."
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