For about 50 years, the site at 800 E. Euclid Ave. in DeLand, Florida, was a hilly, par-72 golf course with narrow fairways.
Sandhill Golf Course, about 25 miles from Daytona Beach, closed in 2017, and the former fairways have become overgrown while the 10,000-square-foot clubhouse remains boarded up.
But this month the DeLand City Commission gave Orlando-based Elevation Development the final nod of approval to designate the former golf course as a brownfield site.
Eventually, Elevation Development plans to put 541 single-family homes and 320 multi-family units on the approximately 168-acre site, according to city documents.
Before the cleanup of the site can begin, a Brownfield Advisory Committee, a role filled by the city’s Economic Development Committee, will first need to review the Brownfield Site Rehabilitation Agreement for the property.
The agreement could make the site eligible for the Voluntary Cleanup Tax Credit program, which was created in 1998 “to encourage participants to conduct voluntary cleanup of certain dry cleaning solvent contaminated sites and brownfield sites in designated brownfield areas,” according to the Department of Environmental Protection.
The Brownfields Redevelopment Act went into effect in 1997. Its goals, according to the Department of Environmental Protection, include: to reduce public health and environmental hazards on existing commercial and industrial sites that are abandoned or underused due to these hazards; create financial and regulatory incentives to encourage voluntary cleanup and redevelopment of sites; and derive cleanup target levels.
Cobb Cole attorney Michael Sznapstajler, who is representing the developers, explained the process during the City Commission’s first hearing on the resolution.
The designation “does not affect the land use, it does not affect the zoning, but is the beginning of a process that someone endeavoring to clean up and redevelop a property would undertake,” Sznapstajler said. “You go out and you investigate the site; you sample soil, groundwater, surface water, look at what the issues are out there; you study the history of the site.”
Sznapstajler said once the issues are identified, a cleanup plan is made. The plan is then sent to the Department of Environmental Protection for review.
“I think it makes sense for us to designate it as a brownfield regardless of what happens there,” Vice Mayor Charles Paiva said during the Oct. 19 meeting. “I feel like this is a tool in the toolbox to help us fix some of the damage that occurred much like at the other golf course south of town.”
The 105-acre DeLand Country Club, which closed in 2012, has since been transformed into Country Club Corners, a Publix-anchored shopping center created by Tailwinds Development.
Mayor Bob Apgar asked Sznapstajler how long the cleanup and remediation took in that case.
“We got through that in a little under two years, which, for an environmental cleanup, is impressive,” Sznapstajler said.
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