Yes, we know it
’s not perfect, but the Temporary Use Permit the city granted
John Fry’s Institute Golf Course last week is a step in the right
direction.
Yes, we know it’s not perfect, but the Temporary Use Permit the city granted John Fry’s Institute Golf Course last week is a step in the right direction.
Even Craig Breon of the Audubon Society said the TUP might have some positive side-effects by providing valuable research data. He has long been a critic of the course owners’ wholesale trampling of plants, animals and waterways, all of which were there first and deserve some consideration.
We think the TUP gives the city a handle on what is going on out there – something it has never really had in the past.
Now, with the TUP’s 27-point list of projects designed to monitor and control water and fertilizer use, ease the carnage among the red-legged frog and California tiger salamander and repair part of the damaged riparian ecology – to say nothing of neighbors with wells polluted from nitrate runoff – golf course management seems to be going in the right direction.
The TUP does allow for limited play – 16 rounds a day – but only until Sept. 30 and no golf carts. The permit is necessary so that routine maintenance can take place on the course until the environmental review is completed and mitigation measures agreed upon.
Course operators should get with the program, ask City Hall what needs to be done, and do it. Otherwise, the city is likely to declare the course out of bounds and levy far more than a two-stroke penalty.
The city has fought with the course owners for seven years to get them to follow the same rules ordinary mortals in town have to follow. Citizens have noticed this discrepancy and are beginning to rise up and complain at City Council meetings and on editorial pages.
Let’s hope golf course managers move forward and do the right thing – complying with the TUP – so the Fry name will take on the positive aura it otherwise deserves. The Fry family supports community efforts and, except for this one major lapse, is a fine and welcome member of the South Valley community.
The Math Institute itself, the research body now in Palo Alto but planning to move into buildings near the golf course, deserves a better association when it comes to town. Its work in mathematical research is widely known and respected. Its work getting school children excited about math is even more terrific.
Possibly at the end of this travail all will be rosy: the Math Institute will be here, working away in pleasant surroundings, causing math groupies in the schools to rival rock bands; Institute conference people will be playing golf on an environmentally sensitive course; frogs and salamanders will cavort in the bulrushes with smiles on their faces and – could this be possible? – a Fry’s Electronics store might come to town, drawing hordes of grateful customers from Coyote to Salinas and Los Baños.
Is this all too much to hope for?
