CGF, Audubon team up on golf course
by Craig Breon

Start with a powerful businessman and a city council lax in enforcing their own rules, throw in the game of golf and a few red-legged frogs, and stir the pot with a couple conservation organizations, and - Voila! - you have the controversy of the Math Institute Golf Course.

Expansion starts in 1997, sans permits
John Fry (of Fry's Electronics fame) and one of his associates, Steve Sorenson, decided some years back that building their own golf course would be fun. Fry then bought a large property on the outskirts of Morgan Hill, where a small golf course already existed. John and Steve drove around the land deciding where the new holes should go, where to place the trees and where to put the turf. Evidently, these guys really like turf - because John and Steve's golf course has more turf grass than any other course in Santa Clara County.

Unfortunately, John and Steve didn't bother to get the permits needed to expand their golf course. No approval from the Morgan Hill City Council, no Environmental Impact Report, no permits from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service or the Regional Water Quality Control Board and no public hearings at which neighbors or local conservationists could discuss the many implications of this greatly expanded course. They did obtain a permit to grade 40 acres to improve the existing nine-hole course, but they then graded 150 acres and doubled the course size.

Math institute or PGA tour?
But our story gets weirder. This golf course is supposed to be adjunct to a math institute Fry intends to build on the same site (which, by the way, may be a nearly 60,000-square foot structure modeled after the Alhambra, a Moorish castle in southern Spain - for a rendering, see the Institute's website. Evidently John and Steve decided that math geeks and a world-class golf course (over which local golfers have been publicly drooling) go together like peas and carrots. In reality, Fry seems to have designed the course not so much for mathematicians as for future PGA tournaments - although this is not admitted in documents submitted to the City of Morgan Hill.

Course poses significant environmental problems
Here's a short list of problems with the Institute Golf Course, according to Morgan Hill's own documents:

• Potentially poisoning local groundwater wells with levels of nitrogen fertilizer three times higher than drinking water quality standards (and people in the area do drink the groundwater);
• Increased local flooding due to runoff from the course and changes to drainage in the area;
• Significant impacts on the availability of local groundwater due to the immense amounts of water needed to maintain the turf grass on the site;
• Bulldozing up to and even into Corralitos Creek, which destroyed habitat for the threatened red-legged frog and other wildlife.

Morgan Hill looks the other way
What did the City of Morgan Hill do about this? The answer is: next to nothing... until recently. The City did order the work stopped and required the production and approval of an Environmental Impact Report - but John and Steve rejected the draft of that report, which described the project's significant impacts as well as potential violations of the federal Clean Water Act, the California Water Code, the California Department of Fish and Game Code, and the federal Endangered Species Act.

Around the time that the Morgan Hill Times editorialized this summer about the outrage of letting the wealthy run roughshod over the town - and only after Committee for Green Foothills and Santa Clara Valley Audubon Society (SCVAS) filed in July a formal code enforcement complaint against the Institute - did the City take a stronger stance towards John and Steve.

After CGF and SCVAS alerted Morgan Hill that John, Steve and their friends were indeed using the course (and operating without required permits), City officials sent the Institute a letter demanding that they "cease operations." However, even this was toothless, since the City then turned around in a couple weeks and - again without public comment or environmental documentation - issued the Institute a Temporary Use Permit to continue operations. To their credit, the permit contained conditions that will slightly lessen the environmental impacts of the project.

CGF and Audubon step in to ensure local protections
Audubon and CGF have appealed that permit. As a result of our actions, the Morgan Hill Planning Commission have just held their first public hearing on the Institute - approximately five years after the project was started. We will continue to focus on this issue: commenting on the Environmental Impact Report that is now being prepared, working with the Institute's neighbors and local activists to minimize the impacts of the course and maximize its habitat values and trying to ensure that such a monumental lapse of local control cannot happen again.

While this story may sound flippant, the issue here is serious. John and Steve have broken a number of laws, and they should have been stopped and punished. Instead, local resource agencies and, notably, the Morgan Hill City Council have been asleep at the wheel. As a result, the neighbors of the Institute and natural resources have suffered. Perhaps worst of all, it appears that Mr. Fry, his family and his associates have been trying to influence the City with political and charitable donations. Unfortunately, we see those tactics used every day at the local, state and federal levels, but that doesn't mean we should be any less outraged. What has happened here is wrong. We can try only to make it better - and keep it from happening again.

Craig Breon is the Executive Director of Santa Clara Valley Audubon Society. In his spare time he chairs the Planning Commission in Portola Valley, and teaches an undergraduate course in Environmental Law and Regulation at Santa Clara University. For more information, see our Action Alert.


Published October 2003 in Green Footnotes.
Page last updated November 13, 2003 .