What I learned chatting with folks ...

This afternoon I spent a couple of hours cruising the neighborhood and chatting with folks who live near the fans. An interesting pattern began to emerge ...

1. When someone calls the club management to comment on fan noise, the response is always, "Gee, there haven't been any issues with the fans." This, of course, is designed to give the impression that everyone else thinks the fans are just fine, and to make the other feel like he must be supersensitive or something to think the fans are a problem.
2. The next step is always to offer to cut the nearby fan off from 6-9 PM and AM (as if having a root canal for 18 hours per day rather than 24 hours per day would somehow make it satisfactory). This move is to convey the impression that the club management is being "reasonable" and has made concessions to settle the issue.
3. Residents who raise questions about the fans are told, "It's happening everywhere. That's how golf courses operate now."

Putting this pattern together makes it abundantly clear why the club has so resisted efforts for a neighborhood dialog on the fans. Their strategy is based on NOT having people talking to each other. Isolate the opposition, and buy them off one at a time by allowing a few hours of peace and quiet each day. (Did any of us move to MacGregor Downs with the expectation that the club management would be dictating when we could use our porches and yards?)

And the claim that "It's happening everywhere" is a half truth at best. Most golf courses are not in the process of digging up and replacing all their greens. So any move toward mega fans is still years away for the great majority of clubs. There are a few, like MacGregor Downs and Porters Neck GC in Wilmington, who have bought into the mega fan strategy hook, line, and sinker. Maybe this happens because the fans are being pushed hard by the "greens reconstruction" industry. But clubs that follows this route run into neighborhood opposition (as in Wilmington and Chapel Hill). Most clubs that opt for large fans use them on only a few greens. (MacGregor currently has the fans on 12 greens.) As heavily settled as the MacGregor Downs neighborhood is, the mega fan approach is a horrible one. The cumulative impact on property values is in the millions of dollars, and this is in addition to loss of the peace and tranquility of the most affected homes. This process is most certainly NOT happening everywhere, and we can't afford to let it happen here.