The Oakview Golf and Country Club is hoping for a wetter season next year after struggling through a very dry summer in 2018.

The golf club's reservoir ran dry in summer due to poor spring runoff and a lack of rain over the summer.

As a result, the club was forced to purchase water from Rhineland Municipality to essentially preserve it's greens under last summer arid conditions.

Newly elected president Craig Neufeld said they hope to avoid that kind of situation in 2019, because it's costly.

"We did have to purchase some water in order to keep things going. It's something we had to do it, but our bottom line did take a hit. We'd like to have enough water for ourselves, and hopefully we get a lot of snow this winter to replenish our reservoir for next year."

Neufeld said the club would like to improve their reservoir system and possibly expand it to avoid a similar situation in future dry years, but at this point it's very preliminary.

"We're talking with the municipality (Rhineland), with some local businesses to see what we can do with the reservoir that we have, and possibly digging out another reservoir so that we can have a larger water supply going forward."

The Oakview executive wrote a letter to Rhineland in early August requesting about 600,000 gallons of water in order to preserve its greens at a cost of about $8,700. Rhineland council approved a small grant to help offset some of that cost as a stop-gap measure.

"We did give them a small grant to help them with their operating costs, but I think we would like to engage the golf course in a long term strategy," said Reeve Don Wiebe. "We don't necessarily want to use potable water for the maintenance of greens ... in this time of drought management."

Wiebe said Rhineland would like to to work more closely with the golf club to help keep it viable, but council would like something more long term from the executive in terms of sourcing an adequate future water supply.

"We have some equipment and resources, and we could possibly help them to source funding through grant applications. I think we could be very helpful in that process."