Bill Would Let Water Fund Aid a Golf Course

RALEIGH — The Clean Water Management Trust Fund is charged with buying property and financing projects to protect water, but its mission may become more flexible.

State lawmakers are a step away from giving the independent state agency more leeway in the type of ventures it helps finance, where water benefits may not be as evident. And that’s raised concern over whether supporters have pet projects in mind.

A bill nearing final passage at the state legislature would allow the fund to also consider grants for “innovative efforts,” including pilot and research projects, to improve water quality and storm- water management statewide. The bill faces one more vote in the Senate to concur with minor changes made in the House before it’s sent to Gov. Mike Easley.

Senate Majority Leader Marc Basnight, D-Dare, said he sought the change to encourage the trust fund’s leaders to support water quality projects that are more far-reaching.

But some critics note that the fund is considering a request from N.C. State for $5.8 million to buy property in Tyrrell County — within Basnight’s district — for an ecologically innovative golf course.

Basnight said his support of the bill has nothing to do with that specific project, though he likes it. He said the university would have to raise the money to build the course.

“Don’t picture this as a place for Marc Basnight to play golf,” Basnight said. “It would be an experimental place, studying ways to not use herbicides and insecticides traditionally used in golf courses and to develop new grasses.”

The university wants to buy about 376 acres of farmland along the Albemarle Sound, next to the Eastern 4-H Environmental Education Conference Center.

The project calls for restoring former wetlands and establishing 58 acres of greenways and buffers along waterways to prevent runoff. The university would put conservation restrictions on 90 acres of forested property it already owns, while long-range plans call for the environmentally friendly research golf course to be open to 4-H members and the public.

University leaders requested the money last year, but asked that a decision be deferred until this year so they could get an option on the land. The trust fund is due to formally consider the request in September.

University officials and others involved in the project believe it would provide valuable research as well as a local economic boost as the region’s only public course.

“We would bring in experts and build a nine-hole course that would keep the natural grasses in place, not use agricultural chemicals, and make it an ecological model,” said Marshall Stewart, leader of the state 4-H Youth Development Program, which is part of N.C. State’s Cooperative Extension.

But critics say the fund has more pressing projects to consider under its existing mandate.

“There are far more imperative and important water quality projects that need to be conducted, in my opinion,” said David McNaught, former executive director of the Clean Water Management Trust Fund.

McNaught, now a senior policy analyst at Environmental Defense, said the trust fund was not created to buy land for golf courses, but to obtain property to restore wetlands and provide pollution buffers. The fund was established in 1996.

The Senate’s Republican leader agreed and questioned whether the fund should be involved in the project.

“To ask the people to pay more money in taxes in order to fund a golf course, regardless of how environmentally friendly, is going to strike a lot of people as an inappropriate use of state money,” Sen. Phil Berger, R-Rockingham.

“If people begin to see it as a way to funnel money into districts for special projects, I think the political support for the trust fund will erode.”

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