Clearwater doesn't have a golf course to save. It has a landfill to clean up.

Clearwater doesn't have a golf course to save. It has a landfill to clean up.

*By Jeremy Reynolds*

There is a word going around Clearwater right now, and the word is "green."

Save the green space. Protect the green. Seventy-seven acres of green, right there off Airport Drive, the last big open lot in a city that has spent sixty years filling in every other one. I understand the instinct. I have spent a decade of Thursday nights in Pinellas hearing rooms defending exactly that instinct.

But green is a color. It is not a function. And underneath the green at the Landings Golf Club is a private landfill that stopped taking garbage in the 1950s, that the city bought in the 1960s, and that somebody smoothed over and planted with Bermuda grass around 1970 — back when the accepted method of closing a dump was to stop putting things in it.

That is not open space. That is a lid.

Now a developer wants to build a $180 million sports complex on it, the City Council has opened a thirty-day window for competing proposals, and a coalition of neighbors has organized to save the golf course. I am not here to sell anybody a water park. I am here to point out that the golf course is not the thing standing between that neighborhood and a pollution problem. The golf course *is* the pollution problem, and it has been allowed to be one because nothing has ever required it to be anything else.

Consider what the city actually knows about this site. It ordered a Phase I and a Phase II environmental assessment — in 2019. That is roughly a half-century after the fill went in. This year it went looking for federal brownfields money to figure out what to do next. The developer says the old landfill covers the north 22 acres. Nobody in public has seen a monitoring well network. Nobody has published a groundwater contour. Nobody has told the people on Keene Road what is moving under their feet, because nobody has ever had to.

That is the part that should make you angry, and it has nothing to do with pickleball.

Here is the regulatory reality. A golf course triggers nothing. No environmental resource permit. No stormwater retrofit. No closure standard. No cap integrity inspection. The drainage on that property was designed in 1970 and it has never had to meet a single treatment requirement written since. Residents who show up to save it will tell you, correctly, that the course floods and that Keene floods with it. They are describing a failure and calling it a feature.

Redevelopment triggers everything. Current permitting standards. Treatment. Assessment. Closure. The only mechanism that exists in Florida law to force this site to be characterized and cleaned is the thing the neighbors are organizing to stop.

And this water has somewhere to go. The Landings drains toward Stevenson Creek, which the state verified as impaired for dissolved oxygen and nutrients back in 2007 and wrote a pollution budget for in 2014. That budget calls for cutting nonpoint nitrogen loading in the watershed by 85 percent. Eighty-five. We are not close. The creek is a place where manatees calve and oysters have only recently come back, and it sits at the bottom of nearly ten square miles of concrete that drains through this parcel's neighborhood on the way to Clearwater Harbor.

Clearwater has already learned this lesson once, a few blocks away. When the city needed nitrogen out of that same creek, it took the old Glen Oaks golf course and turned twenty-one of its thirty-one acres into stormwater treatment, at a cost of about $7 million. The city's own engineers put the price of removing a pound of nitrogen from this watershed at roughly $5,000. Do that arithmetic on 77 acres and you will understand what the Landings is actually worth — not as real estate, but as untreated runoff nobody is paying to fix.

So my ask is not "build it." My ask is this: the city should publish the 2019 assessments in full, before the proposal window closes and not after. It should put monitoring wells on the north 22 acres and along the property line. And it should condition any lease it signs — including a lease that keeps the golf course exactly as it is — on state-standard closure of that landfill cell and a stormwater system built to the rules the rest of us have to follow.

Sixty years is long enough to leave a dump under a fairway and call it a park. Whatever Clearwater decides to build there, it should first agree to find out what is already there.

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*Jeremy Reynolds is a paralegal in Dunedin. He is the former chair of the Dunedin Committee on Environmental Quality and Sustainability, co-author of the city's sustainability master plan, and currently serves on Dunedin's code enforcement board.*