How Monterey County golf courses find ways to deal with California's ongoing drought

PEBBLE BEACH, Calif. -- Landscape architects must come upon the Shore Course with the same timidity that befalls a caricaturist confronted with the Mona Lisa.

Consider the image: jade-colored fairways sweep along a Pacific Ocean pounding insistently at the shore, while bentgrass greens are surrounded by natural rocks and sugary bunkers. Here and there, the horizon is pierced by the jagged scribble of cypress trees.

Part of the stately Monterey Peninsula Country Club, the Shore Course is one of several renowned golf courses on the Monterey Peninsula. This week, three of them -- Shore Course, Spyglass Hill and the famed Pebble Beach Golf Links -- will play host to the 2015 AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am.

The marquee event emphasizes the region's golf ties, with 28 courses helping bolster the Monterey County's $2.3 billion tourist economy. And yet these luxuries have an open secret in an arid, drought-stricken setting where policymakers fight over water like bickering divorcees -- they require billions of gallons annually, and no one says a peep.

One reason is that California's loose groundwater rules have given many courses unfettered access to water. Another is that several courses, including those playing host this week to Bill Murray, Ray Romano, Buster Posey and some of the world's best golfers, realized long ago that the well was running dry, and decided to do something about it.

That story was the first chapter in a book that is still being written, one that involves litigation, plenty of wheeling and dealing and how communities define themselves. As California's seemingly interminable drought stretches on, local golf courses have started turning to recycled wastewater, begun to let creeks run dry and even reshaped course layouts.

But another chapter is still to come. While many courses have made impressive strides in adapting low-impact water practices, more still pump unregulated water from aquifers.

That could be about to change. Under California's 2014 Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, the state's highest-priority groundwater basins -- and several on the Central Coast rank at or near the top -- will be forced to examine their long-term sustainability for the first time in state history.

And that means some courses could find themselves playing from a very difficult lie.

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How Monterey County golf courses find ways to deal with California's ongoing drought