ALBANY -- A 50-inch fan -- a much larger version of the one in your living room -- blows across the 17th green at Capital Hills Golf Course, a sheltered section of Albany's 300-acre city-owned links on the city's southwestern edge.
The fan accomplishes what nature doesn't -- keeping a steady breeze moving across the green, combatting moisture to battle fungi, plant diseases and weeds that can quickly overwhelm the delicate, impossibly short bent grass.
The whirring blades are just one of longtime Superintendent Scott Gallup's weapons against the pests and perils that would otherwise savage the course's fragile playing surfaces.
It is other parts of that arsenal -- a range of pesticides, some classified as likely or known carcinogens by the Environmental Protection Agency -- whose appropriateness is coming under scrutiny by city lawmakers.
A Common Council committee has been charged with re-evaluating Albany's 12-year-old ban on the use of those chemicals on city land -- an ordinance that was ignored almost as soon as it went into effect.
