New York Fairways Get a Little Greener

Mike Rewinski’s feat of getting 30 of the 34 golf courses on the end of Long Island to sign on to an Environmental Protection Agency program to reduce their use of fertilizers may be the equivalent of shooting six under par.

Persuading some of the nation’s most exclusive country clubs to cooperate with such a government watchdog would have been a challenge under any circumstances -- and then there’s the bitter memory of 1990.

That was when the New York state attorney general’s office sent a questionnaire to 107 golf courses all over Long Island, asking “in the most polite way,” as one golf official put it, for basic data on their use of fertilizers and pesticides. Then the state issued a report whose language was anything but polite.

Titled “Toxic Fairways,” it reported that the 50-plus courses that had voluntarily filled out the forms were using more than 200,000 pounds of fertilizer a year, more than a ton each in the case of six private clubs, all of which were listed by name.

It suggested that the golf facilities might be contributing to levels of chemicals in local drinking water that were, in one case, 20 times “safe drinking water standards.” It told how 700 geese died after spending time on one Long Island course. And it threw in how one person had died after exposure to pesticides on a golf course, though that had been in Virginia a decade earlier.

“They really did a hatchet job on us,” recalled Rewinski, 55, who then, as now, worked at a golf course. For the last quarter-century, he’s been the superintendent -- the man in charge of keeping up the grounds -- at the Westhampton Country Club.

But Rewinski also believed that “golf courses in general are tired of being branded environmental waste sites,” and that was one reason he set out to recruit other superintendents in his area to work with a program organized by the EPA and several local agencies. The goal was to improve conditions in the Peconic Estuary, which abuts three bays near the eastern tip of Long Island, where it splits into north and south forks.

Rewinski had a personal reason for wanting the cleanup to succeed.

Having grown up in Southampton, he is the grandson of a bayman who made his living “clamming during that season, scalloping, eeling, whatever was seasonal.” But since those days, he noted, changing environmental conditions had wiped out the scallops “and there are always areas closed off for clamming.” Rewinski said there was far less eel grass than he saw as a child and the water often was cloudy in the estuaries, the areas where fresh and saltwater meet.

So when Rewinski saw a notice for a public meeting on the Peconic Estuary program last year, he decided to attend, and became part of a citizens advisory committee. In November, at the end of the golf season, he helped arrange a meeting of his peers in the East End Golf Course Superintendents group.

But it took another 10 months, until Sept. 22, before the EPA could announce that 88% of the courses in the area -- all but four -- had agreed to participate in the East End Nitrogen Management Challenge for Golf Courses.

The program was designed to reduce the runoff from fertilizers that fuels the growth of oxygen-hogging algae if it reaches the estuary.

The clubs signing on included several in the affluent Hamptons that date to the days of the Robber Barons and remain among the most highly rated golf courses: the Maidstone Golf Club, the National Golf Links of America and its neighbor, Shinnecock Hills Golf Club, which held the U.S. Open championship this summer.

After a conference call among some of the participants Thursday, officials announced that the first site visit to a course had been scheduled Oct. 27, at North Fork Country Club.

EPA officials have promoted the agreement as the first of its type with virtually all the golf courses in a target area.

It was made possible, they said, by avoiding the confrontational approach taken by the attorney general in 1990. Suspicions lingering from the “Toxic Fairways” report were overcome by making nongovernmental parties -- including the United States Golf Assn.’s own agronomists, and others from Cornell University -- key players in the program.

“Some of the superintendents were concerned about working with government, but they were more willing to work with the [golf association] and Cornell,” said Rick Balla, the EPA’s team leader for the Peconic Estuary program. Accordingly, the courses will provide their data this time to Cornell horticulture experts, and will remain anonymous.

The EPA has acknowledged that, though golf courses are an easy target, they are not a major cause of the problems in the estuary in an area where agriculture, boating and lawn care also contribute to pollution.

“They’re a relatively small contributor, but they’re highly visible,” Balla said of the golf courses.

The program aims to convince the golf superintendents that it is in their interest to reduce the runoff of nitrogen fertilizers into the groundwater, because any that is lost that way is not helping their grass grow.

The EPA is asking them to consider fertilizing only their “fine grass” -- tees, fairways and greens -- but not the rough, and to fertilize more frequently with smaller amounts so all the fertilizer is absorbed into the grass.

“In a lot of ways, the greens keepers are interested in being stingy with fertilizer,” Balla said. “If they’re putting too much on, they’re having to cut the grass more often.”

Another key player in the program, Jim Baird, one of 18 agronomists who work for the golf association, said it had been easier to convince the courses to cooperate than to get others to believe that golf courses could be environmentally friendly.

“We’ve gone from very little support to nearly all the golf courses being involved because we’re trusted by the courses,” Baird said. “[But] there’s more people who don’t play golf than do play, so they think the courses are wasting a lot of water and fertilizer for this silly game.... When it comes to the emotional issue, they don’t want to hear scientific facts. They want to believe what they want to believe.”

Among the courses, officials say, the more elite clubs actually proved easier to recruit than some of the public ones, whose greenskeepers worried that they might need more fertilizer because they have far more players and thus more strain on their grass.

Of the four holdouts among the 34 courses in the area, Balla said, “one was a small 9-hole course and [the owner] was saying he was interested in perhaps selling his golf course and didn’t want to make a commitment.”

Although that owner may remain a hard sell, “the other three I’m going to bet that within a month we’re going to have all of them on board,” he said.

Rewinski, the superintendent who first implored his colleagues to “deal with these people,” said that the program benefited from being in sync with some current trends in greens keeping.

“Clippings are a problem. When you mow in the morning they make a mess. So guys started using less nitrogen and applying it more frequently. This way you’re avoiding growth surges,” he said.

In addition, there’s a move toward firmer, faster golf courses and away from lushness, and, he said, “you can’t have fast greens if you use a lot of nitrogen.”

But Rewinski said the program’s ultimate selling point was in its realistic goal -- that they use no more than 2.8 pounds of nitrogen per 1,000 square feet of ground each year, “less nitrogen than the average lawn care.”

“And that is not a limit, that’s a goal,” he said. “It was basically a no-brainer.”