The Water Advisory Committee (WAC) has asked Gardiner’s Bay Country Club to consider installing a huge retention pond to support its summer irrigation needs.
GBCC has applied to state regulators to nearly double its water allowance. Jay Card Jr., the club VP and chair of its greens committee, presented the plan to the WAC this summer. Chair Peter Grand invited Card to Monday’s WAC meeting for further discussion. If Grand has his way, the club may also have to do what another WAC member described as “social engineering.”
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Current conditions
An estimated 200 million gallons of precipitation annually falls on the club’s 154 acres of primarily open land. About half, 100 million gallons, ends up in the aquifer — estimated to be 80 feet thick where the club is located in Hay Beach.
Under a state permit, GBCC withdraws 6 million gallons of water annually for irrigation. However, most pumping is during the growing season, about 180 days from mid-April to mid-October. The club has asked state regulators to double the irrigation allowance to 12 million gallons.
It also wants to add another 100,000 gallons of potable water to its 400,000-gallon drinking water budget for clubhouse use, but this wasn’t discussed during Monday’s WAC meeting.
As part of the water withdrawal permitting process at the state Department of Environmental Conservation, the club has to demonstrate that its request for more water comports with Town regulations.
Town Code pertaining to irrigation exempts “golf course tees and greens, irrigated fairways existing as of 2003” but is silent on course expansion. So among the issues to be sorted is whether and under what circumstance the Town might allow GBCC to expand the area it irrigates, now about 18 acres.
GBCC future needs
The permit request is part of a larger project to renovate the golf course that Card says is needed to ensure the future viability of the club.
Editor’s note: My husband, Eddie, is a longstanding Gardiner’s Bay Country Club member. We had a family membership early on but changed to a single membership long ago.
Some of the additional 6 million gallons would irrigate exempt areas for which he says the club doesn’t have sufficient permitted water. Some would go toward expanding play and practice areas. Some would be used to create and maintain berms, swales, and other infrastructure to capture stormwater on club property and recharge it into the groundwater.
You can find more details about the plan in this Gazette post.
Retention pond for summer irrigation
At Monday’s WAC meeting, Grand suggested that instead of pumping more water for irrigation in the summer when the Town encourages everyone to conserve, the club could build a huge retention pond capable of storing millions of gallons.
Card said that with certain assurances, the club might consider such a pond. But it would have to be enormous — up to 15 acres — to make up for water lost to evaporation. (For context, Shelter Island’s Fresh Pond is about 15 acres.)
Grand advised that the Town might require the club to keep evaporative loss to less than 50 percent — various methods, including covering the surface with ping pong balls, were mentioned.
Whatever the guidelines regarding evaporation, the club would still have to fill the pond, which would require millions more gallons of pumping than requested, Card said.
Grand said the additional pumping wouldn’t matter so long as withdrawal occurs in the off-season.
His reasoning: as a natural part of the water cycle, pressure causes enormous quantities of water to seep from the aquifer into surrounding surface waters, particularly in winter when demand is low. He reckons GBCC could fill its pond in winter, capturing a resource that otherwise would be “wasted.”
But Card said the WAC must provide “some sort of guidelines that I can bring back to the membership and develop a plan that ultimately could be approved at a governmental level and that I can get approved by the membership.”
“The problem is we’re trying to hit a moving target here,” he said.
Grand outlined a scenario where the club would agree to fill a reservoir in winter while minimizing evaporative loss. In exchange for the Town’s support of its expansion proposal, the club would:
- shut off its irrigation pumps in the summer
- irrigate in summer from stored water, which will help recharge groundwater and prevent saltwater intrusion
- keep soils moist so they don’t become hydrophobic and cause harmful runoff
- create other infrastructure to retain water and “pay” with this additional recharge for any additional water pumped
“That’s the structure of something that I think the whole community could start to get behind,” Grand said.
Social engineering?
Throughout the meeting, it was unclear what authority Grand and the WAC have to negotiate for so specific a strategy (especially one that seems to involve numerous other regulatory entities and hurdles).
But then Grand added other points wholly unrelated to the WAC’s role of advising the Town Board on water matters.
He said he’d observed that club governance depends on membership. “And I’m seeing more and more off-Island membership in the country club. I want to know that your board is going to be responsive to the Town of Shelter Island and our needs and not to the needs of people flying in from where they fly in to use your golf club.”
“Also, there’s the rich versus poor thing,” Grand said. “I know that you have a program to have inclusion and have people, the police and the fire people, be able to golf and use the club.
“I want some assurance that representation will remain on Shelter Island and [be] inclusive,” Grand said.
WAC member Lisa Shaw questioned the committee’s standing to make such requests. “[GBCC] can do that voluntarily,” Grand said.
“This is a water advisory committee, not a social engineering organization,” WAC member Andrew Chapman said.
“I agree,” Grand shot back. “This is a little beyond our scope, except this is our water, and we don’t want to lose control over it.”
‘Irrigation is not bad; summer pumping is bad’
Chapman spoke directly to Card.
“I’m trying to understand the position you’re in,” he said. “You’re running a business and you’re requesting, basically, additional use of a regulated resource. And you’re trying to figure out — if I were you — how I can get to yes here.”
Turning to Grand, Chapman said, “I just want to make sure that we’ve been sufficiently clear with them so they can go back to their professionals and say this is kind of what could work for this group, what can we do to actually meet some of their objectives and ours so that we can all get to yes.”
Grand responded, “We’ve been saying irrigation is not bad; summer pumping is bad.”
What’s feasible?
Town Engineer Joe Finora asked Card how much water storage would be feasible for GBCC.
Card said the club has an undeveloped wooded area of about 19 acres where it could build a retention pond. The topography with “somewhat of a little low depression” lends itself to the use, he said. But numerous trees would have to be felled.
Finora asked Card to provide a reasonable estimate of how much water the club could hold for summer irrigation.
“If you come back and say we can hold 30 days, but 60 days means we have to clear 15 acres of untouched vacant land … perhaps that’s not something that we want to entertain,” Finora said.
The onus, Shaw said, is on GBCC to say how much is feasible, “or are we having an argument that can’t even come to the table.”
“It’s a feasible thing for us,” Card said.
“Obviously,” Grand said, “we each have to take a step toward each other over time here. And we have to bring along the other boards, old and new, and we have to bring along the community.”
Referring to the WAC’s printed agenda, he repeated aims he’d written in two bulleted items: “Elimination of summer pumping in favor of storage and recharge. And, paying for any increase in pumping winter water with equivalent capture on or beyond GBCC borders.”
“The other things that I brought up I think are important, but down the line, maybe,” he told Card.
‘Win-wins’
Card said the club’s proposal already includes a “win-win” for the Town and club, representing “probably the largest historical capture of water on Shelter Island.” It calls for building and maintaining structures to retain significant amounts of water for onsite recharge into the groundwater.
Part of the additional irrigation allowance would support the creation and ongoing maintenance of berms, bioswales, and other water retention infrastructure.
“What we’re looking to do is very beneficial for the community,” he said. “We’re going to put water back into the ground for everybody to use in that area.”
Another “win-win” in the GBCC plan, Card said, is that captured water won’t run off into Coecles Harbor, as it does now. However, the club needs more water for irrigation to keep the turf from drying out during hot weather. “We want to try to maintain the soil somewhat in a condition where we’re not going to have runoff.”
At Chapman’s request, Card said he’d set up field visits for any WAC members wanting to see the golf course and check out the possible location for a retention pond. Grand said the conversation had been interesting, “and I hope that we take this as positive steps forward.”
Card said the club’s proposal is positive. “It’s a positive thing, talking about protecting Coecles Harbor. We’re looking at trying to protect our membership and make sure Gardiner’s Bay exists in the future.”
Other business
In other business during the long meeting, WAC also heard from Menantic Creek Keepers Conservancy, now formally acting as a subcommittee to collect water quality data on the Town’s behalf. The group will make regular reports to the WAC going forward.
The citizen science effort was begun by neighbors concerned about the health of the creek ecosystem, especially after studies showed that Town Center septic effluent flows toward the bucolic waterbody. Alice Deupree and others lead the effort, working closely with Finora. Deupree said the project has only just begun to generate sufficient information to establish a baseline.
Deupree said the data show that conditions in the creek during hot weather overnight low tides are especially worrisome as oxygen levels plummet, posing a hazard to aquatic plants and animals.
A goal is to determine whether dredging would improve conditions. If so, the group might seek grant funding to extend periodic dredging operations that take place in adjacent West Neck Harbor to include the creek.
Christopher Herman, who lives in the Heights near Chase Creek, said he was interested in starting a similar data collection project there, prompting others present to propose the project for waterways around the Island.
Chapman said he worried about engaging more citizen scientists to collect data without establishing specific project goals.
Finora said the data collection — which requires specialty equipment and rigorous adherence to schedules and protocols and isn’t to be taken on lightly — has been guided by outside technical advice coming largely from the USGS. The data will be used in consultation with other scientific advisers for diagnostic purposes, he said.
Fertilizer forum on Thursday, September 28
Shaw said she’s working with other Town committees on a joint presentation aimed at educating Islanders about the hazards that misuse of fertilizers can pose to ground and surface water quality.
The presentation is Thursday, September 28, at 5 PM at the Shelter Island Public Library (additional details TBD).
