Glendale country club treats pond that had 7 times the expected level of key chemical

Corrections & Clarifications: Information about the phosphorous levels expected in a man-made lake was added to this article, and the headline was updated.

Executives with Arrowhead Country Club in Glendale this week are taking responsibility for the putrid smell coming off the golf course’s sixth-hole pond, which has bothered nearby residents for years.

Arcis Golf, the company that owns the club, acknowledges that it shouldn’t have allowed the smell from the lake to persist. The company added that it should have addressed the algae buildup contributing to the odor before residents of the Arrowhead Ranch subdivision felt compelled to bring their complaints to the city.

“We want to be a good neighbor, bottom line,” Arcis Golf Regional Vice President Paul Nash said. “We slipped up here … we fixed it. We've addressed it (and) we are committed to maintaining it as it is today.”

Nash spoke Thursday morning from the lake, where he and other Arcis officials showed the improved conditions following ongoing chemical treatments.

For about the past month, Arizona Lake and Pond Management has relied on different products meant to remove phosphorous and eat away the organic sludge that’s been built up at the bottom of the lake.

So much built up that in a recent sample, phosphorous levels were more than seven times higher than what was expected in a man-made lake that uses reclaimed water and 37,000 times the level expected in a natural lake.

Pond Management, which maintains about 100 lakes across the state, has been the country club’s contractor for weekly lake maintenance for about a decade. Its owner, Jeff Jenkins, said the chemical treatments should clear away the algae buildup, thereby ridding the lake of odors, within six months.

“Typically, in six months … there won’t be any issue, there won’t be any odors or any algae issues,” he said in a phone call.

He was referring to the company's treatment of other lakes that had significant algae growth and unpleasant odors. But he expressed confidence the country club and surrounding neighborhoods will see the same results within a similar timeframe.

“We’ve done it numerous times here in the Valley. It’s been very successful,” he said, adding, “The last time it was used … it was a 2-acre lake, and we had it with less than 2 inches of sludge in under six months.”

For years, residents of the Arrowhead Ranch subdivision have complained of the stench coming from the sixth-hole pond of the golf course, located along the south side of Loop 101, between 67th Avenue and Union Hills Drive.

Arcis’ efforts to treat the lake come only after residents had reached a boiling point, noted Helena Johnson Bodine, the HOA president for Arrowhead Ranch Phase Two.

“(Residents) have been ignored, so the credibility is not there anymore,” she said of Arcis. “We are hopeful that a resolution to this issue will start to build a better relationship — when the residents start to see improvement and start experiencing the improvement.”

Code violations against the golf course mounted, according to city officials. The matter, however, didn’t get resolved.

It came to a head earlier this month when Glendale prosecutors formally accused Stephen Bais, the Arrowhead Country Club’s golf course superintendent, of allowing the stench to endure.

In Glendale Municipal Court, he entered a not-guilty plea to one count of a class 1 misdemeanor criminal charge for allegedly violating a city code relating to noxious smells.

A class 1 misdemeanor is the most serious crime without being a felony. A pretrial conference has been set for April 24. If found guilty, Bais could be sentenced to six months in jail and fined up to $2,500.

Arcis officials said they’re committed to not seeing that happen.

“He has our full backing,” Nash said. “Every legal resource, we will use.”

How did the golf course’s lake get like this?

Arrowhead Ranch residents have often described the smell of the lake as sewer-like.

Johnson Bodine previously said it was a “repulsive” and “nauseating” odor.

In a September 2021 complaint to Maricopa County’s Environmental Services Department, one person said the lake “smells like a cesspool.”

Another complaint lodged with the department two years later said the “odor is unbearable” and that “outside spaces are unusable.” The person also reported there being “scum covering a lot of the water surface.”

County environmental inspectors went to the country club in both cases, but neither visit resulted in any enforcement actions, as there was nothing for them to regulate, explained Johnny Diloné, the department’s media and communications manager.

The person who filed the 2021 complaint alleged seeing human feces and toilet paper in the effluent, or reclaimed water, at the lake. Inspectors didn’t find any evidence to support the claim. They instead noted that the whitish clumps the person may have observed were goose feces.

In the second case, the inspector was specifically checking to see whether the standing water at the lake was creating a breeding ground for mosquitoes.

Though the inspector stated in the report that the lake wasn’t breeding mosquitoes, they described it as “green and filled with blue algae with a horrible smell.”

Like all lakes, Jenkins explained, the Arrowhead course’s sixth-hole lake is a living entity, meaning sludge will accumulate over decades.

The Arrowhead golf course opened in 1986. Its ponds, which he called retention ponds, collect cut grass, leaves and other debris, which “start to break down over the years, and yes, creates odors.”

“Quite frankly, what’s happening at Lake Six is very natural … it’s happening at other lake communities,” Jenkins said. “This is not unusual. The only difference that’s going on is the residents living around the lakes are tired of the smell, and I don’t blame them.”

Historically, residents have noted, the smell is at its worst during the summer.

As temperatures rise, the algae in lakes grow.

But during the holidays this past winter, the smell didn’t go away like it normally does, prompting additional complaints to the country club and the city of Glendale.

When did Arrowhead and Pond Management start addressing it?

It was November, Nash said, when he first noticed the smell hadn’t gone away yet. He recalled being “baffled.”

“In the summer … it's a different issue when it's 115 degrees, and this lingered, which we were puzzled by,” he said.

Pond Management, Jenkins said, did what it could in December to get rid of the smell by treating it. The issue, though, is the chemicals used are designed to work best when the water temperature reaches at least 60 degrees.

“Live bacteria doesn’t work in temperatures below 60 degrees. You can put it in, but it’s just going to be dormant, it’s not going to activate or eat anything,” he said of the sludge digestant used to eat the organic matter.

With the weather now warmer, there’s been a noticeable difference, he said, citing conversations with residents who gave “nothing but positive feedback.”

Acknowledging the years’ worth of issues related to the smell and algae growth at Lake Six, Jenkins said he advised the country club in November that it was time to correct the bottom of the lake, as throwing in some algaecide was no longer working.

When The Arizona Republic asked Arcis officials whether Pond Management had expressed any concerns before November that there might be a bigger issue, Ryan Copenhaver, the regional superintendent for Arcis Golf, said: “Not to my knowledge.”

“If they did say there's a smell, they're basically telling us what they're going to do to fix it,” Copenhaver said.

Around that time, Pond Management started the process of testing the lake. First, it used a Sludge Judge, a glass rod that’s sent to the bottom of the lake to collect a sample from the sludge bed. The company sent the sample off to a laboratory for analysis.

Simultaneously, it sent a water sample to another third-party testing site, which confirmed high phosphorus levels.

Phosphorous levels in a natural lake shouldn’t exceed 0.02 parts per million, as “anything higher can affect the lake and create (an algae bloom),” according to Jenkins. For man-made lakes that use reclaimed water, such as those at the golf course, a typical phosphorous level is about 100 parts per million.

At the sixth hole, it had a reading of 746 parts per million. That is more than 37,000 times the threshold for natural lakes and more than seven times the typical level for a man-made lake.

Testing also was done to check the levels of hydrogen sulfide, often characterized as a rotten egg smell. The odor test showed the lake’s hydrogen sulfide levels were at 0.3 parts per million.

“Anything above 0.2 is noticeably odorous,” Jenkins said.

How has Arcis responded?

In a full-throated apology over email, Arcis spokesperson David Leibowitz acknowledged that the company should have acted sooner. He also said Arcis has learned from its mistake, knowing it failed its commitment of “creating boutique experiences for our members and guests” and being “good corporate neighbors.”

“It’s redoubled the company’s commitment to do better,” Leibowitz stated in the email. “We hope that the community will accept the apology from Arcis’ leaders, and then judge the company by its future actions.”

As part of that commitment, Country Club General Manager Jeff Barba met with Johnson Bodine and Tom Cramer, HOA president of Arrowhead Ranch Phase One, last week to keep communications between the groups “open and flowing.”

“What has happened is water under the bridge, so to speak, and we're moving forward,” Barba said. “We're looking forward to additional meetings and getting that feedback from the residents as well with their help.”

Touching on her observations from that meeting, Johnson Bodine noted it was more productive compared to the initial meeting she and Cramer attended with the club’s former general manager last September. She said the company representatives, including Nash, directly apologized to them for not taking corrective actions sooner.

Echoing Barba’s comments, Johnson Bodine said Arcis has expressed a desire to be more communicative with the surrounding neighborhoods and is looking to hold an open house forum so company representatives can answer questions and address concerns.

Citing conversations with some of her neighbors, Johnson Bodine said the smell doesn’t appear as bad as it once was. She said they all hope “that it’s not a temporary fix.”

“We hope that it is being resolved, finally,” she said, adding that she would like to meet with the Arcis officials again in about 90 days “to get a temperature on where everything is.”

Presently, Pond Management’s priority at the country club is Lake Six, but within the next couple of weeks, Jenkins said, the company will have collected samples from the rest of the ponds to determine whether others are having similar issues.

From there, he added, the company can address them in a “priority manner.”

“(Lake Six will) be resolved,” he said, “and then we’re going to get proactive and we’re going to go to every other lake in that community, sample them and test them to make sure they’re not happening at every other lake, because quite frankly they’re as old as Lake Six, so they should all be in that same condition.”

As for Bais, Leibowitz said what happened at the lake is not a reflection of the golf course superintendent, who’s “been a consummate professional throughout his nine years at the club.”

Bais is a specialist in caring for turfgrass, according to Leibowitz, meaning his responsibilities don’t include “advanced maintenance of the club’s ponds and lakes.”

That work is supposed to be handled by licensed experts, as required by law.

“We feel awful that this ended up in court,” Leibowitz stated in the email. “We’re supporting Stephen fully, including paying his legal fees to resolve this matter.”

Shawn Raymundo covers the West Valley cities of Glendale, Peoria and Surprise. Reach him at sraymundo@gannett.com or follow him on X @ShawnzyTsunami.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Glendale country club treating lake that 'smells like a cesspool'