The Naperville Park Board may spend $400,000 to install new wash pads to clean its golf course equipment in a more environmentally friendly fashion.
Staffers at Naperbrook and Springbrook golf courses currently wash equipment such as mowers at maintenance shops with the runoff going into the nearby soil and waterways, golf director Kevin Carlson told the Naperville Park Board last week.
If approved by the board next month, the park district will enter into a $44,000 professional services contract with engineering consultant the WT Group to design the wash bays for improved filtration and wastewater drainage.
The park district has wash bays at its Central and South maintenance facility that filter out solid material before wastewater is discharged into the sewer system.
“For (golf) to be able to put a wash basin in makes a whole lot of sense, to bring them up to par with what we’re doing in parks. And it’s better for the environment,” Commissioner Marie Todd said.
Board President Mary Gibson asked if this is a better environmental investment than, say, electric golf carts, which she’s been told would be cost prohibitive for the district.
“I wonder if we want to have consultants or if it’s worth talking to people in our community who are environmental experts and just make sure we’re putting the resources into the best application for environmental sustainability,” she said.
“Four hundred thousand dollars sounds shocking to me. It sounds like a pretty big number,” Commissioner Josh McBroom said.
Carlson said staff has for years tried to rectify the issue with lower-cost methods, such as filters and screens. “It’s a short-term fix for a long-term problem,” he said. “It was creating quite a bit of staff time, and it wasn’t really fixing the situation.”
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Even so, he noted, the project is not going to have any kind of immediately measurable return on investment.
“You’re not going to see staff time reduced. You’re not going to see a cost of savings in water,” he said. “It’s just we’re looking at the environmental practices, and we want to try to find a way to improve those.”
“Which is really important,” Gibson added.
Giles Bruce is a freelance reporter for the Naperville Sun.