Somerset County Golf Courses Help New Jersey Rivers

Darrell Marcinek, CGCS, director of golf maintenance for the Somerset (NJ) County Park Commission (center), poses behind the River-Friendly sign at Warrenbrook Golf Course. Photo courtesy of Darrell Marcinek

All five golf courses in the Somerset County (NJ) Parks Commission portfolio are certified participants in the River-Friendly Program. All five prominently display their River-Friendly status, but each has taken a different path to get there.

“When (program managers) went to each course, they set specific goals for each course,” explains Darrell Marcinek, CGCS, the commission’s director of golf maintenance and a 33-year GCSAA member. “There are different goals based on topography or features. It started with Quail Brook. They set a bunch of goals for the golf course specifically for Quail Brook. One of those goals was to naturalize some areas and we built a rain garden. Then it spread to Neshanic Valley and then to the other three.”

Marcinek says the lessons he learned on one course could be applied to the next, so soon all five courses he oversaw—Quail Brook, Neshanic Valley, Green Knoll, Spooky Brook and Warrenbrook, spread across the county just west of Staten Island, N.Y.—were awarded River-Friendly certification. Only two other courses, not owned by the Somerset County Parks Commission, are certified, though three more are listed as “participants in progress.”

“A lot of it was exercises we were already doing,” said Marcinek, who joined the commission in 2002 as a grow-in superintendent in Neshanic Valley and became director in 2006. “We just had to document it. They come back every three years and look at things. Sometimes they find something. At Warrenbrook, we’re still trying to get our washdown recycling system in place. That’s been a goal for seven years. It’s our only job that doesn’t have one. We set goals every three years. There’s still work to be done.”

The River-Friendly Program is a joint partnership of the Watershed Institute, the New Jersey Water Supply Authority and the Raritan Headwaters Association, plus program partner the Rahway River Watershed Association. The River-Friendly Program focuses on four areas: water quality management, water conservation, wildlife habitat enhancement, and education and outreach.

It includes segments for businesses, schools, residents, community partners and yes, golf courses.

According to Marcinek, the fact that the committee had planned five courses presented an additional challenge.

“We have five courses in five different locations,” he says. “One of them is in the mountains. It’s heavily forested. It was harder to find areas to naturalize than at Neshanic, where we already had 75 acres of naturalized areas. (At Warrenbrook) there’s a shopping center parking lot that feeds into an irrigation pond. We don’t have that challenge at any other course.

“But most of our practices, our watering practices, our plant protection practices, are the same everywhere. We hand water as much as possible and use wetting agents everywhere. We put rain barrels all around the clubhouses. When we had some ideas for the first one, Quail Brook, we tried to put them on the other courses to make it easier for the superintendent.”

If the process sounds a lot like Audubon International’s Cooperative Sanctuary certification, then so it is, as Marcinek knows all too well.

Two commission courses – Neshanic Valley and Quail Brook – are Audubon certified, which “has always been a goal of mine,” Marcinek says.

“There are some similarities,” he says. “It’s the right thing to do, and we were already doing it for the most part, so we decided to document it and show it off. We’re not overstaffed, but we have the people and resources to take the time to do it. We have time in the winter, in the off months, to document what we’re doing. As a county, a municipality … we’re under intense scrutiny all the time anyway.

“And the majority of our golfers appreciate it. We found out early on that we were a little overzealous in naturalizing some areas, and we had to scale that back, but it’s all been well received. We have signs — monarch (butterfly) signs, river-friendly signs — all over the courses. We’ve promoted environmental awareness at times, and they’ve tolerated it, and they’re proud of it.”

Andrew Hartsock is Editor-in-Chief of GCM.