Fore!
Golf course tee time set for March 1

Gallup City workers dig a trench Friday afternoon to install an irrigation pipe to help handle water at the municipal golf course. The golf course is closed through the end of the month while crews work to make improvements. (Photo by Jeff Jones/Independent)

By Zsombor Peter
Staff Writer

GALLUP — Local golfers have a little over three weeks to go before they can hit the links at Gallup's municipal golf course again.

The city closed down the course in December for $300,000 worth of some long overdue repairs, and officials expect to be ready for the March 1 reopening.

Parks Director Vincent Alonzo said crews had begun furrowing the roughs in preparation for laying down mulch and planting indigenous plants, and planned to begin tilling the fairways within the next few weeks.

To help overcome the difficult growing conditions in the area, said City Manager Eric Honeyfield, the city's goal is to create more top dressing on the fairways by breaking up the underlying clay and adding mulch, which should provide richer growing conditions for the grass that's to come.

There's also 200 feet of a new drainage system left to build that, when finished, should help keep the salty water another killer of healthy grass from being reused in irrigating the course. The city will also be fighting Mother Nature by neutralizing some of the natural salts in the soil with an acid generator that's added to the effluent at the local wastewater treatment plant.

To further help the course's look, the city will also be making its roughs often just dirt and clay a little greener as well, a decision the city manager knows won't please all the golfers out there.

While dirt roughs are easier to play off of, they can also be an eyesore.

"You can't have it both ways," Honeyfield said of the tradeoff.

Some of the golfers on the City Council were especially concerned about the roughs, and asked that they at the least be made level.

"Golf's hard enough as it is," said Councilman Bill Nechero. "We don't need to add to it ... especially the way I play."

Councilman Pat Butler raised concerns about some of the putting greens as the grass on them looked to be "dead or dying."

Alonzo said he hoped to revitalize them by opening day by treating them with fresh water.

Back in August, when the Council approved the project, it also agreed to send the assistant city manager and another city employee to meet with faculty from New Mexico State University's agriculture department in Las Cruces for help.

According to Honeyfield, however, the golf course management experts down there told them nothing they didn't already know about the challenges they were facing maintaining a healthy course in the high desert of northwestern New Mexico.

The city also decided that paying a private management company to run the course was too expensive.

Yet another option suggested back in August to have a class at New Mexico State study Gallup's situation and submit an end-of-semester report with their recommendations for improving the course also fell by the wayside.

What the city ended up doing was keep its golf professional on board to promote the game through the community and run the course, but place its responsibility for the course's agricultural health in the hands of a head greenskeeper under the parks director.

Honeyfield, who visited the course Thursday, said the city may not have absolutely everything ready by the end of the month, "and what we don't get done we'll do next year."

Wherever things stand Feb. 28, he said, the course will definitely be open for business on March 1.