Tee-Off Time in Fight Over Water’s Path : Sepulveda Basin: Ernani Bernardi and fellow golfers complain to a City Council committee about plans to bisect Woodley Golf Course with a new pipeline project.

Los Angeles City Councilman Ernani Bernardi and a group of brightly clad fellow golfers testified Monday that plans to cut water pipelines across the city-owned Woodley Golf Course would needlessly disturb the city’s already sorely pressed golfers.

In remarks before a City Council committee now considering a motion Bernardi introduced about the pipeline project, Bernardi, an avid Woodley player, complained “that it’s about time golfers got some consideration.”

The project would bisect the Woodley course, cutting across eight fairways and forcing them to be shortened for at least two months. An average of 110,000 rounds are played each year at the flat Sepulveda Basin course, which is popular with seniors.

But Mayor Tom Bradley’s office and city engineers said the golfers’ plea to have the two pipelines dogleg an additional 2,000 feet around the Woodley course would add an unacceptable $700,000 cost to a major public works project.

The $9-million project is the first leg of a far-reaching plan to use treated effluent from the Tillman sewage treatment plant immediately east of Woodley to irrigate golf courses and city parks in the San Fernando Valley. Tillman water is now dumped into the Los Angeles River.

In the initial phase, Tillman water flowing through one pipeline would be used to irrigate Woodley and the basin’s two other courses, Encino and Balboa. A second pipeline in the same trench would be used to fill up the newly created Balboa Lake, north and west of Woodley. Now just an empty hole, Balboa Lake is to be used for boating and fishing upon completion of the pipeline project.

“The mayor is trying to be patient about this project, and he’s running out of patience,” John Stoddard, Bradley’s top environmental aide, said in an interview. “The issue of these golf concerns should not hang up this project, especially with a drought.”

After hearing from both sides, members of the City Council’s Arts, Health and Humanities Committee said the city should not pick up the extra tab for realigning the pipeline.

But if the golfers would pay the extra cost, that would be fine, said Councilman Joel Wachs, the panel’s chairman. “I’d be willing to go with that,” Wachs told Bernardi.

Marty Tregnan, president emeritus of the L.A. Municipal Golfers Assn., the lobbying arm of the golf community, said he would endorse a surcharge on existing green fees at all 13 city-owned courses to pay for the extra cost if he were assured the costs were not inflated.

Tregnan, wearing a red blazer with golf patches on it, said he believes current cost estimates for rerouting the pipeline are too high.

Any change in greens fees--now $10.50 for 18-hole weekday play, $14.50 for weekend games--must be approved by the city’s Recreation and Parks Commission. About 1.2 million paid rounds are played each year on the city’s courses.

Before he could endorse a fee hike, Tregnan said he would want the city’s Recreation and Parks Department to verify the costs of a new route. The $700,000 estimate is based on an analysis by a private engineering firm and the city’s Department of Water and Power.

Golfer skepticism about the costs have gotten a sympathetic ear from the city’s parks department.

“The department staff’s position is that nobody really knows what the extra costs would be,” said Frank Catania, director of the parks department’s planning unit.

The department hopes the city’s Board of Public Works, which is now in charge of overseeing the pipeline project, will authorize the design of two routes--one across Woodley and one around it--and put them both out to bid among contractors. That would finally determine what the real cost differential would be, if any, Catania said.

Catania and Tregnan also noted that the $700,000 in extra costs does not account for lost revenues to the parks department from Woodley’s golf operations.

Catania predicted the pipeline-laying project would result in $50,000 to $100,000 in lost revenues from a drop in use of the course by golfers and from reduced greens fees charged players. Typically, fees are cut when the courses are not fully playable.

Bernardi said in an interview later that the “City Council can raise the questions, but the parks department can actually stop the work. We’re going back before the committee next Monday, and by then, we want to get some more figures--where they get this $700,000.”