Water Pipeline Won’t Slice Across Fairways

A plan to build a water pipeline through Woodley Golf Course in the Sepulveda Basin that annoyed many golfers, including Councilman Ernani Bernardi, is dead, a Los Angeles city engineering official said Friday.

The plan was dropped because city officials found a way to route the pipeline around the 18-hole municipal course without incurring the high extra costs they had feared, said Sal Oregon, Bureau of Engineering liaison to the council.

The bureau originally wanted a direct route for the pipeline from the Tillman Water Reclamation Plant to Balboa Lake.

Although the route would have sliced across eight fairways of the golf course, it would have been $400,000 to $700,000 cheaper than the route around the course preferred by Bernardi and other golfers, the bureau had said.

The pipeline is to carry treated sewage water to supply the lake and irrigate the Sepulveda Basin golf courses.

But a compromise plan that reduces the cost of a bypass route is now possible because it has been learned that the city’s Department of Water and Power intends to install another water pipeline along some of the same route the golfers had proposed.

This will enable the city’s reclaimed water project to use the same trench as the DWP project, Oregon said.

The City Council on Friday passed a motion, co-authored by Bernardi, to instruct the Bureau of Engineering to enter into negotiations with the DWP over sharing the cost of the double pipeline.