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MARINE PARK: City golf course gets green from state

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See this story at BrooklynDaily.com.

By Colin Mixson

Brooklyn Daily

The city’s largest public golf course has gotten a grant from the state to help keep its greens green.

The Marine Park Golf Course received a $502,900 “green infrastructure grant” to build a rainwater harvesting system as part of a plan to make the course independent of the city’s expensive water supply.

It wasn’t long after Michael and Adam Giordano took the reigns of the city-owned golf course in 2008 that the father-son team realized their new business would wither — both fiscally and literally — if it continued relying on the city’s metered pipes.

The vast course can drink up to four million gallons of water a year — costing the operators a staggering and unsustainable $1.8 million at current rates, with rates going up every year.

“Without improving the economics, and reducing our dependence on grid energy and city water, the park is not going to continue to grow, or even exist,” said Adam Giordano.

This was the Giordanos’ third try at securing the state grant, and while the funding will help ease its water woes, they say water harvesting is just part of the solution.

“It’s a piece of the puzzle,” said the elder Giordano. “It’s a welcome piece, but still one piece.”

In addition to building the half-million-dollar system to capture rainwater, the Giordanos will have to expand the park’s pond in order to store it, and drill on-site wells to draw additional water from underground if they hope to get the golf course off the city’s pipes. But those projects are still tied up in red tape, and the worry is that bringing these other puzzle pieces together will take longer than the operators can continue shouldering the massive water bills.

“We have the money to drill the wells, but it’s in the Parks Department budget, and that could take four to five years to be acted on,” said Michael Giordano. “But we don’t have another four or five years.”

The alternative to taking these steps to free the thirsty course from the expensive city water supply would be to go the way of previous operators and shut off the tap, turning the greens into browns — a backslide that Giordano does not want to see happen after investing so much time and money in remaking the long-distressed course into a lush golfer’s paradise.

“Now that there’s a renaissance going on,” he said, “to cut that renaissance off now would just be really tragic.”

Now that the Giordanos have the money mostly in place to implement their plans, the last obstacle to making the renewed golf course sustainable is navigating the maze of city and state agencies that must sign off before work can begin.

“We have a gauntlet of people with oversight over these things,” said Michael Giordano.

He credited the successful state grant application to a coordinated push by elected officials, including state Sen. Marty Golden and Borough President Markowitz, but Giordano worries that with all the upcoming turnover in City Hall, the public course may not find a champion to maintain the momentum to finish the multi-faceted project.

“Unless there’s someone shepherding this through, it may not happen,” he said. “And that would be a shame, because this is a city asset, and if the city doesn’t do this now, it would really be a missed opportunity.”

Reach reporter Colin Mixson at cmixson@cnglocal.com or by calling (718) 260-4514.

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