6 Comments

What an excellent write-up. 👏 Thank you for the call to action!

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The gentleman's excel spreadsheet of public records requests is mystifying. Invoices? Why not just request the water usage for the last 12 months at each of the city's golf courses? If he is mystified as to what they get billed for that water, he should request their direct water expenses by month for each golf course.

Not clear why he is so focused on golf courses. They typical Phoenix golf course is 150 acres, 100 of which is turf. A well developed 18 hole frisbee course is 36 acres.

IF these courses are original customers of SRP, they get water in acre-feet, a acre of water one foot deep. There are 326,000 gallons in an acre-foot.

It's hard to believe they would be customers of Phoenix water paying $4 per 1,000 gallon or $1,300 per acre-foot (WAG).

Is he upset because golfers are getting subsidized and playing their sport while he gets denied?

What's the end game? It's hard to believe they wouldn't just produce a spreadsheet of water deliveries and charges for each golf course.

Does he want to become a water activist? Changing the water law and customs underpinning the behaviors of 4.2 million people in Maricopa county, that have existed since the 1800's? Good for him. Go splat against that wall.

Or, is he interested in carving out 20 acres of one of those courses and enjoying frisbee golf?

Or, is he just upset and interested in punishing the bureaucracy?

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Response from Jeremy Thacker

John, I've received the P&L's for the City's golf courses. The City's courses use over 3K acre ft for irrigation and paid $64K total for all courses. Thats about 33% of water usage and less than 1% of the water costs for Parks.

The City has stated that they do not have documentation supporting the transactions that add up to $64K for golf or $10M for Parks. My requests in the spreadsheet are just a high level description of my extraordinarily specific requests. My total communications with the City are over 300 total pages.

My issue currently has nothing to do with disc golf and everything to do with golf. 20% of developed Parks' land are exclusively occupied by Golf while less than 1% of the population uses the courses. The courses use enough water to support 100K people. The amount of resources dedicated to Golf don't match up with the needs of the City.

And I'm always interested in punishing those who abuse power.

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According to the National Golf Foundation, 8% of the population plays golf. Where did you get your 1% from?

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