With water at a precious premium on the Monterey Peninsula, it’s hard to justify using potable flow to irrigate golf turf. Several Pebble Beach courses already use recycled water and stored rainwater. Seaside’s Bayonet and Black Horse courses are in line to re-use wastewater, too.


Now, the city of Pacific Grove is tapping the trend.


Last month, the Monterey Regional Water Pollution Control Agency board set a goal of supplying the P.G. Golf Links with recycled wastewater, perhaps by extending the Carmel Area Wastewater District pipeline that supplies Pebble Beach.


P.G. Mayor Carmelita Garcia, who sits on the MRWPCA board, credits a collective effort to resolve the city’s water constraints. “I’m tickled pink that it came through,” she says. 


MRWPCA General Manager Keith Israel suggests a possible trade with CAWD: In exchange for supplying P.G. with recycled water, the agency could send P.G.’s wastewater – which now flows to the MRWPCA treatment plant in Marina – into the Carmel district’s system. 


“There are a lot of people we need to coordinate with,” he says, “but the concept looks very good on the surface, and it’s something we probably could complete fairly quickly.”


Sarah Hardgrave, P.G.’s environmental programs manager, says other options include tapping MRWPCA wastewater and routing rainwater from the Forest Lake Reservoir – but extending existing pipelines could be cost-prohibitive. Another possibility: turning a Cal Am corporate yard on David Avenue into a reservoir.


About 100-150 acre-feet could supply both the links and the cemetery, she adds: “We would want to maximize all the irrigated city properties that we could.”


The parties plan to meet this summer to hammer out the details. But ultimately, Garcia says, it falls to the P.G. City Council to approve the project and figure out how to pay for it.