A Times Editorial

Doing the right thing with golf course plan

The city of Clearwater appears poised to reverse a wrongheaded course that would have complicated or delayed its ability to complete a flood-control project at the Glen Oaks Golf Course.

Sometimes, changing your mind can be a virtue.

The golf course on Court Street is at the center of a 535-acre drainage area that produces highly polluted runoff and has flooded badly following heavy rainstorms. Studies have shown that the solution to both problems is to turn much of the golf course property into a large drainage pond alongside Stevenson Creek.

Because of the potential risk to the public from flooding, not to mention the well-documented water quality problems in Stevenson Creek and Clearwater Harbor, the city should have been scurrying to shut down the golf course as soon as possible and build the drainage project.

Instead, the city was planning to build a new $600,000 clubhouse at the golf course and continue leasing the course to the Chi Chi Rodriguez Youth Foundation for years. The city expected to construct only a small portion of the needed drainage work, off in an area where golfers would not be affected.

City officials came in for some well-deserved criticism after that plan was revealed, and city commissioners and the city manager decided a review was called for.

The result, reported in the Times Wednesday, is that the clubhouse project is "dead on arrival," according to City Manager Bill Horne. Further, the city learned it can break its lease with the Chi Chi foundation with a year's notice and also figured out that it had the money to complete the full Glen Oaks drainage project right away.

Now the city staff is preparing to hire an engineering firm to design the pond and other drainage facilities and will take a plan for the work to the City Commission this summer.

Commissioners presumably will see the wisdom of this new course of action. It makes no sense to choose recreation over public safety.

Reclaimed-water users face reality

Some reclaimed water customers in North Pinellas are complaining because when they turned on their sprinkler systems a few days ago, nothing came out.

Welcome to the real world, folks.

Many of these customers apparently had labored under the illogical belief that they could use all the water they wanted, even during a drought, and it would never run out. Some of them even watered their lawns for hours every day -- something that horticultural experts say is not necessary unless you are trying to establish new plantings.

Since the weather turned hot, there has been so much watering going on that the reclaimed water system is being drained of millions of gallons daily -- so users in Dunedin, unincorporated Pinellas and St. Petersburg are facing restrictions on the number of days per week they can water.

Just like the rest of us.

Reclaimed water is not an unlimited resource. It is essentially sewage that has been cleaned up enough to be safe for use on lawns. The amount of reclaimed water that can be produced is limited not only by the amount of sewage flowing into the system but by the local government's ability to clean it up, pump it and distribute it. Though local utilities are scrambling to increase treatment capacity and lay more water lines, they still produce only a fraction of the reclaimed water that would be required to serve everyone.

Pinellas County is the driest county in the state, and much of the Southeast is struggling through a drought. Surely even reclaimed water customers can accept that they should not use more water than they need.

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