Water restrictions puts Kapalua course at risk for PGA Tour event

The Hawaii golf course that hosts the PGA Tour’s season opener was on its seventh day without irrigation water Thursday, a serious setback in its bid to save the Plantation course at Kapalua in time for the January tournament.

The lack of irrigation stems from a dispute with Maui Land & Pineapple over its century-old water system on Maui that delivers irrigation to west part of the island.

Kapalua Golf Resort decided last week to close the course on Sept. 2 for two months to use the water it was allowed to protect the turf, including verticut mowing to thin out dead grass and allow it to better absorb water, and a slow-releasing fertilizer.

But then a tough situation got worse when MLP went from a Tier 2 restriction (60% of normal irrigation) to Tier 4 (no irrigation) over the weekend. Kapalua had not watered the Plantation course since Aug. 29.

Alex Nakajima, the general manager of Kapalua Golf and Tennis, said plans to verticut and other measures were put on hold.

“We have all the plans to act,” Nakajima said Thursday. “But without water, we can’t do anything. It’s tough.”

At the center of the dispute is the 11-mile Honokohau Stream and Ditch System that runs from the West Maui mountains and supplies irrigation water to the Kapalua area.

Tadashi Yanai, the Japanese billionaire who owns Kapalua and who founded the apparel brand Uniqlo, along with Kapalua homeowners and Hua Momona Farms, filed a lawsuit Aug. 18 against MLP, alleging it has not maintained the water delivery system.

Maui Land & Pineapple said it has made “certain repairs and improvements to the ditch system” as directed by the Commission on Water Resource Management and that all its actions are “consistent with the agreements between MLP and the golf courses.”

The PGA Tour has been at Kapalua since 1982, first as part of the unofficial season late in the year before becoming the season opener in 1999. Wisconsin-based Sentry Insurance is the title sponsor of a tournament that officials say brings some $50 million to the area.

“We warned previously that another Tier 4 shutdown would be devastating to turfgrass already depleted from months without irrigation,” Kapalua said in a statement. “With the course’s recovery already uncertain under Tier 2, a second forced dormancy makes preparing the Plantation Course to PGA Tour standards for January even more painstaking and tenuous.”

Nakajima could not say how much longer the course could go without water before it puts the start of the PGA Tour season (Jan. 5-11) in jeopardy.

“The longer we wait, it’s not good for us,” he said.