Monthly Feature Hosted By:
	Matthew J. Ceplo, CGCS, at Rockland Country Club in Sparkill, N.Y

With a population of less than 6,000, you’ve probably never heard of Ulysses, Kan. I am sure it is a great place to raise a family, and now, thanks to Jeff Kreie, superintendent at Bentwood Golf Course, a nice place to swing a club. I live in the suburbs of New York City, a more densely populated area, to say the least. It is interesting that both cities face a common problem – excess wastewater.

Our area has very few recycled / effluent water systems. I am not exactly sure why that is. Perhaps the area is so well-developed that running the pipes through neighborhoods is just cost-prohibitive. So honestly, I don’t know much about recycled water systems. In a few locations, the sewer lines are combined with the storm drains. This creates many problems during heavy rains. The water treatment plants cannot keep up with the increase in water and end up dumping untreated water back into the system.

Ulysses faced a similar issue with excess effluent water, but it seems that Brentwood Golf Course has come up with a solution. In the beginning stages when the course was built, Ulysses had much the same issues. There wasn’t enough water to keep the customers, who relied on effluent water for irrigation, happy in the summer, and in the winter, it had too much and was discharging excess water a mile away. When it was determined the city was not conforming to state and local regulations, a deadline for compliance was issued. I have to believe the local government was scrambling to come up with a plan to resolve the issue. Along came Jeff with the help of a few others. He literally turned a negative into a positive.

A lesson to be learned and one that I think is the most often overlooked is that Jeff was involved. He addressed the problem when he attended a leadership training session with other local citizens. He came up with the solution that was eventually selected and became a reality.

Jeff’s example shows the value of superintendent’s involvement in project management, decision-making processes, planning, etc. Congratulations Jeff.

July's Guest:
	Chris Mammoliti, Aquatic Biologist, Watershed Institute, Inc.

As the aquatic biologist on the Bentwood Golf Course/Frazier Park Lake restoration design team, this project brought great opportunities for habitat development and professional growth. While lake and wetland creation is a common practice, the plan to create functioning stream channels—in upland areas where streams did not exist—was a challenge unique to this project. Creating an interacting system of lake, wetland, and stream habitats operating to provide water quality benefits and support aquatic life required a multidisciplinary team of experienced natural resource professionals. Headed by Certified Wildlife Biologist Dennis Haag, the team included professional engineers, water quality scientists, a stream restoration specialist, a fluvial geomorphologist, an aquatic biologist, and course superintendent Jeff Kreie.

From an aquatic perspective, restoring a dry lake bed to a living body of water, along with creating wetlands and meandering streams, runs the full breadth of aquatic habitat restoration in Kansas and rarely happens in one project. As such, the Watershed Institute (TWI) gladly accepted this challenge. TWI is a small, not-for-profit natural resource management company with offices in Topeka and Overland Park, Kansas. TWI specializes in aquatic habitat restoration and the Bentwood project was a perfect fit.

One challenging issue was to design stable stream channels having a dimension, pattern, and profile appropriate to the soil conditions, land slope, available hydrology, and distance to the lake. To address this issue, TWI staff constructed a model stream outside the Bentwood maintenance shop. Using soils from the site, a floor jack to simulate the land slope, and regulated flows from the shop hose, TWI tested various channel widths, meander patterns, and riffle habitat spacing to determine the proper channel design.

Recent biological sampling—approximately 18 months after channel construction—documented a thriving population of aquatic macroinvertebrates in the stream vegetation and riffles. Future plans include an evaluation to determine whether the stream channels will support a population of the Arkansas darter, a small threatened fish that feeds on macroinvertebrates. This potential, along with the current waterfowl and shorebird use of the wetlands, and developing fish community in the lake, make the Bentwood Golf Course/Frazier Park Lake project a distinctive recreational and ecological success story.