LEGISLATIVE UPDATE
The 2026 legislative session is shaping up as perhaps the least troublesome one the golf community has faced in many years. No “Public Golf Endangerment Acts,” no additional restrictions on independent contracting, no bans on non-organics in the Coastal Zone, no overly broad restrictions on pesticide applications, and no decarbonization or conservation mandates that the industry cannot meet. That is, as long as none of the outstanding “spot bills” aren’t unexpectedly populated with language unrelated to their title.
That is not to suggest that 2026 won’t be consequential for the California golf community. This is the first legislative session in which CAG has earned enough cache and credibility to sponsor a piece of legislation – AB 1954 (Ward; D-San Diego), a bill that would give the state’s cities, counties, charter cities, and the state itself a civil remedy to restrain 3rd party brokering that is not performed by consent (written agreement) of the parties. Or as the City of Los Angeles put it in its letter of support of the legislation – “AB 1954 would establish critical safeguards by making the unauthorized resale of public golf tee times unlawful and subject to civil enforcement, thereby preserving the integrity of public reservation systems and protecting equitable access for all golfers.”
AB 1954 will be heard in its Assembly Committees of reference next month, the first one of which is chaired by AB 1954’s author Chris Ward (D-San Diego). San Diego penned the first municipal letter of support. We anticipate that by the time the bill is heard in committees next month, San Diego and Los Angeles will have been joined by other California cities and counties that operate multi-course municipal golf systems, as well as perhaps one or more of the statewide associations that represent cities and counties in California. We will report those when such letters are formally drafted, shared, and filed.
The bill, whose current cumbersome title is likely to be simplified by the time it is heard in committee, can be accessed by clicking here.
The formal letter of support that CAG and its allied associations filed in the form of a coalition letter can be accessed by clicking here.
Previously reported information about the bill can be accessed by clicking here.
When reporting about AB 1954 it is important to always be 100% clear that the bill does NOT in any way affect agreements that are freely entered into for ostensible mutual benefit; it ONLY affects brokering without the consent of the public agency that owns the golf course or the management group that the public agency has put under contract to operate its golf course. There are many well-known and popular vendors in that space. They operate by written agreements that bring benefit to both municipality and vendor, not to mention golfers, and would NOT be affected by AB 1954.
“Least troublesome” doesn’t equate to entirely untroublesome when characterizing the 2026 legislative session. Senator Roger Niello (R-Roseville) has filed another version of a bill that would put California on year-round standard time. This year’s version is SB 1197. You can access it by clicking here.
CAG and its allied associations have filed a coalition opposition letter beefier than the one it filed last year. It’s instructive and can be accessed by clicking here.
It is important to note that the Alliance’s opposition is not so much unalterable opposition as opposition based on the belief that there are many more factors involved in negating the public's clear preference for permanent daylight-savings time than just the very narrow marginal advantage discovered by those who specialize in sleep studies. There are credible studies of other health factors, economic factors, public safety factors, energy saving factors, and highway safety factors that yield advantages for the permanent daylight-savings option. The preference for permanent daylight-saving time has been overtly expressed by the public in 19 other American states with the public in no state expressing a preference for permanent standard time. Public sentiment matters too.
CAG’s belief is that public policy decisions ought to always be made by considering all relevant factors, balancing those sometimes-conflicting factors with each other, and then adding a dose of public sentiment to the mix.
Yes, there will be those who suggest that golf’s interest in this is a selfish one, based entirely on the revenue that would be lost by losing that extra hour of daylight after the workday. To that CAG would respond that the California golf community has often supported legislation, regulation, and policy that has cost it more than SB 1197 would; however, in each of those cases the golf community determined that a compelling societal interest was fulfilled by making those spends. AB 1346 (banning of the sale of gas powered equipment less than 25 horsepower), AB 1572 (prohibition on the use of potable water to irrigate “non-functional” turf), AB 5/2257 (restrictions on independent contracting), and a whole host of water conservation targets and mandates come immediately to mind, not to mention the millions of dollars the industry has spent on sophisticated irrigation technologies, turf research, turf removal, and turf replacement.
These points and the fact that multiple sectors would be harmed, financially and otherwise, by a move to permanent standard time are made crystally clear in CAG’s opposition letter, so much so that we are going to again suggest that you read it by clicking here.
WATER UPDATE
It’s a good thing that we entered this wet season with California’s reservoirs filled to the brim. We’ll know more when the state makes its critical April 1 reading of the Sierra snowpack, but with so much more of this year’s ample precipitation falling much more in the form of rain than snow and March’s record heat precipitating an early snowmelt, it’s not likely that we’ll enter the next wet season with those reservoirs in such good shape.
Add to that the fact that despite some late winter storms having provided some relief from a Rocky Mountain snow year that had been headed for one of its worst years coming atop a series of meager years; it doesn’t behoove us to be complacent about those filled reservoirs. As we discovered just a few years ago, it doesn’t take but a couple of dry years in succession to go from filled to the brim to near zero allocations.
And on top of all that, as Lake Powell and Lake Mead move closer to a dead pool status that would cut the Colorado River from flowing past those sites to Arizona and Southern California, the seven states that form the Colorado Compact are no closer to coming to agreement about how to divvy up the hollowed out spoils of the Colorado River when the current agreement ends less than 10 months from now. And if they cannot come to agreement, something that now appears to be almost certain, the federal government has laid out four (4) options for mandating an agreement, all four of which would spell trouble for California. And because of that, and the reality that Arizona would be critically harmed by any of those four options, were the federal government to try to mandate any of them, a bevy of lawsuits would ensue, leaving the states and the federal government in protracted litigation about rights to a river whose yields are not going to stop dropping while the courts untangle matters.
Given all of that, what seems to be emerging out of this mess is a suggestion from former Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt that the states and federal government agree to forestall a lengthy agreement by a short-term continuation of the current voluntary give-backs from the three lower basin states (Arizona, California, and Nevada) that enables the seven states, including the four upper basin states that have not as yet agreed to “give-back” anything, to hammer out something that balances the needs of all seven with the reality that a river that in 1922 had been allocated at 17 million-acre-feet per year now yields no more than 12-13 million-acre-feet and is expected to yield less and less over time.
Time will tell; it always does. It’s just that in this case, there isn’t much time available to tell.
MUNICIPAL GOLF
In California we long understood the role that municipally owned/managed golf courses played in the long run of growth of the game in the years between the “Progressive Era” in American history (1900-1917) that spawned the municipal golf movement through roughly 1980, when the building and acquisition of publicly owned golf courses stopped. The building and acquisition stopped, but the growth in the number of golfers did not – at least not until roughly 2004, when after more than a century of steady growth, the game stalled out, only to again enjoy a growth spurt in 2020 that continues to this day. A growth spurt not accompanied by a growth and acquisition spurt to support it that has led many to understand that the game’s growth has a cap in urban California beyond which it simply won’t be possible to grow, making it all that much more important that the existing stock of municipal golf properties, roughly ¼ of the state’s golf courses, not be redeveloped for higher and better economic uses.
And nothing focused that understanding more than the two runs of what we called the “Public Golf Endangerment Acts” of 2021 and 2022 – legislation that would have offered up free money to municipal governments and developers to repurpose municipal golf courses as housing complexes with a certain “affordability” quotient. Those two Acts “focused” that understanding and galvanized the golf community into a form of grassroots action in which it had never previously engaged – the rallying of rank-and-file golfers to contact their legislators to oppose the legislation.
In many ways the sponsoring of AB 1954 is a proactive version of those 2021 and 2022 reactive responses. Proactive in the sense of solving a problem rather than just preventing one – a maturation of the game’s advocacy functionality as it were. Also, evidence of the value of that longest distance of runs known as advocacy, where results are better viewed over time than in the moment, yields palpable value over time – sometimes in ways no more than by mitigating losses and eking out the smallest of compromises. It’s not for those faint of heart or short of patience.
It’s not entirely an accident or just the result of dumb luck that we have been reporting in recent months about positive results in protecting that precious stock of affordable/accessible public golf courses that have long sustained the base of the game. A few examples come immediately to mind – Sepulveda Basin in the San Fernando Valley, Buenaventura Golf Course in Ventura, Mission Bay in San Diego, Azusa Greens in Azusa, Wildhorse GC in Davis, The Links @ Victoria in Carson, Tahquitz in Palm Springs – all of them public golf courses that had been threatened with closure or curtailment but whose futures as golf courses are now firmly entrenched.
And to that list of recent municipal victories, we can add a series of them in of all places, Orange County, where courses that we were tracking because they showed all the signs of heading toward the kind of trouble that often spells closure have turned completely around with long-term commitments supported by credible plans that presage long-term sustainability – River View and Willowick in Santa Ana and Meadowlark in Huntington Beach among them; where the locals in Newport Beach managed to secure the massive number of signatures of registered voters to qualify an initiative that would have offered the city the opportunity to overturn a City Council decision to add the acreage necessary for a surf park to displace an executive golf course cum driving range – would have, because the Newport Beach City Council’s decision to reverse its decision rendered the initiative moot; where the cities of Costa Mesa and San Clemente, whose municipal courses were not on the proverbial chopping block but needed some refreshes, are in the process of getting those refreshes. In short, a county that in 2019 witnessed the closure of one of the two Mile Square regulation length municipal golf courses in favor of a parkland use to be named later, a course that was financially and otherwise very successful, is a county now suffused by strong statements about the value of affordable, accessible golf courses. To wit, the following language from the City of Santa Ana’s very recent (March 3) award of a long-term agreement to manage a municipal course that just a few years ago was the subject of discussion about turning it into a regional park:
“Overall, this approach strengthens financial sustainability, addresses deferred maintenance, and enhances the guest experience, while expanding community programming, youth access, and event opportunities ensuring River View remains an affordable, well-maintained, and community-centered public asset for Santa Ana residents and surrounding communities.” [emphasis added]
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To come full circle, the same language about community, affordability, accessibility, and youth access appears in the municipal letters of support for AB 1954. It’s the language of the values that undergird not just the missions of most of the state’s municipal golf programs, but the mission of public parkland golf that the California Alliance for Golf (CAG) and its allied stakeholders have aligned themselves with – an alignment that has been the key to virtually every one of the many successes the game has enjoyed not just in Sacramento, but in the many cities and counties where golf courses have been threatened by closure.
Whether your values coincide with the values the game has aligned itself with or your values differ, know this. These are the values that have served the game well in all those places where the game and public policy intersect in California– not just where municipal golf and the game intersect, but where the game intersects with a whole host of other public policy issues such as environment, water, taxation, and land use, among others. Know this as well. Narratives and messages about the game that conflict with or contradict these values lend credence to stereotypes that the game has worked hard to overcome, as does failure to counter them when they are invoked, particularly by those with connections to the game.
Forgetting this comes at great risk.