Yale Golf-Course Plan Met With Distrust

Upper Westville neighbors of the Yale University Golf Course could have been pleased with the significant news that when it reopens in 2025, after a multi-million dollar environmental restoration, the formerly private, member-only greenway will be transformed into a public one where anyone can pay for a round and play. 

But, on Monday night, the neighbors weren’t happy — and were skeptical that the university would follow through on its many promises.

They could also have been happy with the promise of up to an 80 percent (in several areas of the course) reduction in historically harmful storm run-off from the course onto abutting residential properties. They weren’t happy hearing that news either.

In fact, a scene quite the opposite to happiness unfolded Monday night as 75 Upper Westvillian homeowners who abut the course gathered at the William S. Beinecke House, the course’s clubhouse at 200 Conrad Dr..

There for two hours of passionate, interruption-filled discussion, neighbors’ polite but palpable anger was far from mollified. 

Nor were the Yale presenters’ vision of a much better environmental outcome for the area believed, and the main reason was a percolating and, it seemed, long-standing distrust for the university’s promises.

Click here for a story on the detailed presentation of the university’s restoration, replanting, and storm water control plans – which include chopping down 800 trees, many with soil-securing mature root systems, and planting 2,000 in their stead – in order to widen fairways and greens. Yale staffers presented that info to the public in June before the Board of Alders City Services and Environmental Policy (CSEP) committee.

The Yale presenters at that City Hall meeting — course manager Peter Palacios and Yale’s Associate Director for Planning Jeromy Powers — reprised much of that same info Monday night on Conrad Drive.

As attendees munched on Yale brownies and chocolate chip cookies and listened to the speakers silhouetted against the greens in twilight outside the picture windows, Palacios said the evening was basically an educational session. Its purpose: ​“Another chance to relay the project in its totality and to reassure the community that we’re committed to maintaining the integrity of the environment and habitat.”

It was to be a tough sell.

Although some of the information requested by Laura Cahn of the city’s Environmental Advisory Council and other attendees in June – on, for example, Yale’s pesticide plan for the course – is still being worked on, and Powers said will soon be provided to Cahn, the presenters confirmed to the Independent, that, at least as of now, none of the environmental and other concerns expressed at the June aldermanic meeting had resulted in any changes in the plans, thus far.

Those plans are now under evaluation at the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (DEEP) and with the Army Corps of Engineers. 

Once they are approved, the city will have its chance to review the site plan, storm water management, and the traffic routing and construction logistics at the September meeting of the City Plan Commission. And if all goes as expected, Palacios said work would begin this fall, with the course reopening in the fall of 2025.

Much of the evening’s discussion featured individual homeowners’ tales of flooded basements and the necessity of sump pumps, and pivoted around disagreements about the cause of chronic and destructive flooding.

This was especially prominent on lower Stevenson Road at the southern end of the course. The enigma, unresolved by evening’s end: whether the city’s poorly maintained drainage infrastructure or the tree-cutting carelessness of the golf course management were the culprit.

Here are some other representative exchanges:

When Powers reported that already, through regular maintenance on the course that at least 300 trees (of the total 800 take-downs in the plan, or approximately 30 percent) have already been cut down, an upset-questioner called out from the audience that a thousand trees (if not more) have already been lost. They were removed, he asserted, to make room to dump dirt displaced during the construction of the new Yale colleges over the recent years.

Presenters Powers and Charles Croce, the Tighe & Bond engineer on the project, both said they had no such knowledge, that if what was asserted indeed had occurred, it was ​“before our time.”

That led Stevenson Road homeowners Henry and Connie Horton to wonder why their house, which they bought in the mid-1990s, never used to flood but now does so chronically, and seriously.

Croce explained that Yale’s plan in that regard is to install a drainage system precisely at the part of the course, near Stevenson Road ​“to rescue the run-off by 80 percent,” by diverting it back onto Yale property, and discharging it into the woods.

But Upper Westville Alder Amy Marx – along with many others – asked for reassurance that such plans and promises won’t go wrong.

Two other Stevenson Road residents put it more baldly: Mechelle Craddock-Spence said, ​“You’re trying to create a golf course as prestigious as the university, but that’s not our goal. Do our concerns matter?”

And Larry Hurwitz, from 160 Stevenson Rd., challenged Powers: ​“Do you have a performance bond? Will Yale do it [that is, what they promise?] Put your money where your mouth is!”

Powers replied that there are no current plans for a bond ​“unless the City asks us to.”

Knollwood Drive resident and former state Supreme Court Justice Flemming L. Norcott, Jr., offered another cautionary note based on a convivial lunch he recalled years ago with former Yale President Bart Giamatti: ​“At the end of the day,” he reported Giamatti said to him, ​“the Yale Corporation cares about the Yale Corporation. Watch out for the elephant. Yale and Mandy Management are taking over the city!”

No matter the wide range of positive aspects to the plan that the presenters made – the re-planting of native species, pollinator gardens throughout the course, the removal of invasive phragmites and draining sludge from one of the course’s three ponds to allow for 20 percent more rain storage – anti-Yale sentiment, often based on perceived damage and non-consultation with local folks over decades, ran very deep throughout the evening.

Of the many speakers, only two – local architect Jay Brotman and Cathy Graves, both golfers, offered praise for the plan. ​“Bringing this course up to world class will be a benefit to us, to the city. What I’ve heard is of a sustainable restoration [of the golf course]. I think my neighbors put more chemicals on their lawns than they do [on the course].”

This comment elicited fairly serious boos.

Brotman smiled and gamely retracted his remarks, but he did add: ​“This is not really a natural environment. It’s a garden. If they don’t maintain it, they’ll be more properties and more drainage problems.”

By evening’s end, however, Alder Marx saw some light glimmering at the end of the environmental tunnel. 

In an interview with the Independent after the meeting, she said she was heartened when Powers said, in response to her and others’ ​“gut punch” sentiments, that while the earth’s climate is going to hell, Yale is cutting down mature trees. So, yes, indeed, perhaps a true, one-to-one evaluation of the tree-replacement restoration plan is in order. And one whose goal to being carbon-neutral.

Such an item apparently does not currently exist as part of the submitted plans, and perhaps that can be worked on, Powers suggested.

“I heard movement,” Marx said about the meeting, ​“as I hadn’t heard before.”

And she added: ​“We greatly appreciate the time Yale is investing in holding these meetings. It’s our sincere hope, in addition to meeting, we hope Yale is listening and hearing concerns and willing to make adjustment, in particular regarding insuring the plan meets environmental sustainability principles, in response to a sincere dialogue.”