Gulf Breeze couple unknowingly bought a landfill. They fear someone will repeat their mistake

Abbey and Jeff Rodamaker paid $70,000 in 2019 for a 6.51 acre wooded lot at 1481 Ocean Breeze Lane in the Gulf Breeze area, only to discover that the property at which they had envisioned building their dream home sat atop what, upon inspection, the Florida Department of Environmental Protection determined to be a "promiscuous dump."

The term is one DEP uses to define "an unauthorized site where indiscriminate deposits of solid waste are made."

That doesn't go nearly far enough, the Rodamakers say, toward describing the horrors they uncovered.

"It's 6 acres of trash, 15 feet deep," said Abbey.

She said that when she and her husband made their purchase no one notified them about what had been buried 3 feet below the ground on their property, even though there are county and state records indicating awareness of the dumping that was going on at the site.

Rodamaker said when they finally sold the property in August of 2020, they made sure the buyer, local business owner Johnathon Hamby, knew precisely what he was getting into.

"He bought the property with full disclosure. We had an attorney from Tampa helping us," said Abbey Rodamaker. "He had the FDEP report with the deed and title and disclosure."

Rodamaker said Hamby had informed them at the time of the sale he intended to use to property to store equipment. Hamby did not return phone calls seeking comment for this article.

Records show Hamby, who bought the Ocean Breeze Lane property for $125,000, sold it on Sept. 8 for $400,000 to Navarre-based Talon Investments Inc., owned by William Heslin and Nicole Larson.

Talon Investments is the sister company of Talon Construction, founded by Heslin in 2010, according to the company website. The website states the company offers "a myriad of services from remodeling and renovations to new construction."

"I'm having a real hard time trying to understand why an investment group would want it," Abbey Rodamaker said of her former property.

The sale was brokered by Realty Solutions NWF LLC and agent Kathy Spady, who marketed the property for a buyer "looking for maximum privacy to build your homestead or to develop a small subdivision?"

Neither Spady nor anyone from Talon Investments returned phone calls seeking comment.

The Rodamakers first discovered what lay beneath the land they'd bought in 2019 as they began clearing away trees at what would have been their home site. Glass bottles, plastic containers, propane tanks and tires emerged from beneath the soil, caught up in the roots of the felled trees,.

"We brought in an excavator and began digging holes 3 and 4 feet deep," Abbey said. "There was nothing but trash and water. Trash and water everywhere."

So began the two-pronged nightmare of not only realizing they'd spent their life savings on land they didn't feel they could safely build upon, but also battling Santa Rosa County and the state Department of Environmental Protection for some sort of help.

"We couldn't clean it up ourselves. It was beyond the scope of clearing. It would have been hundreds of thousands of dollars," Rodamaker said. "We fought and fought and fought and fought. We called the Governor's Office the DEP, the county commission. We tried everything we could try to get somebody to listen and try to fix it."

The county and the state don't seem to have placed much credence in the Rodamakers' claims that they'd uncovered a vast dumping ground, one they believed to have been a privately owned landfill the county itself utilized at some point during the 1970s.

"There's not necessarily a lot of environmental concerns," Brandy Smith, external affairs manager with the Northwest District of the DEP, told the Pensacola News Journal in 2019. "We didn't see that volume of waste that's an immediate concern."

Smith said she'd advised the Rodamakers to talk with a structural engineer if they planned to build on their land.

Faced with skepticism and stymied in her efforts to get the county to buy her land, Abbey Rodamaker turned to historical archives to prove her landfill theory.

Related: Couple's dream home turns into nightmare when they find old dump during excavation

She said she went through 30 years of county minutes and found ample evidence that the property at 1481 Ocean Breeze Lane had served as much more than a promiscuous dump.

"This was too big for somebody not to have known about," she said.

Rodamaker's research took her all the way back to 1960 and a man named Adron Broxson, who records showed met with the Board of County Commissioners concerning the hauling of garbage in the Gulf Breeze community. On June 2 of that year, Broxson received a garbage franchise.

State Sen. Doug Broxson was familiar with the name Adron Broxson and believes him to have been a relative. He said he knew Adron was in the trash collection business but he wasn't familiar with the company's operation or what it might have done with the garbage it picked up.

"I wouldn't be surprised by where they might have put the garbage," he said.

It was also obvious from county records that Broxson did not have exclusive rights to garbage collection in the area. Rodamaker found minutes describing a complaint he had made to the county in the early 1960s about the condition of garbage pits owned by another individual in the Hickory Shores area of Gulf Breeze. A second citizen complaint came from another citizen worried about the condition of a garbage pit in the Santa Rosa Shores community.

Rodamaker's research led her to believe that more land in the vicinity of her former home had been used to dispose of trash, and in some cases hazardous materials.

In 2020, Rodamaker contacted members of the Santa Rosa County School Board to inform them she believed the property they were seeking to rezone to build a K-8 school on, 39 acres off U.S. Highway 98 in Midway, was adjacent to an old asbestos and waste tire dumping ground.

In a move that surprised many, the School District soon after withdrew its request for the rezoning.

“During its due diligence, the school board uncovered some conditions that make the proposed school use at this site infeasible,” Patrick Jehle, a project manager with the school district’s engineering firm, told the Zoning Board at the time. “So we respectfully withdraw our application.”

The Rodamakers also paid for what is called a limited scope environmental site assessment. Testing conducted showed that, at one of four areas on their parcel where surface water was tested, cadmium exceeded state groundwater target cleanup levels. All four test sites showed barium and lead exceeding those levels.

DEP though, conducted its own surface water testing and declared that groundwater in the area met department standards.

When the DEP results were published, County Commissioner Sam Parker cheered the county's decision to hold off on making a "knee-jerk reaction" to purchase the Rodamaker's property before testing was conducted. With the state results in hand, the county, in July of 2021, approved development of the Water Leaf subdivision on 10 acres of land adjacent to the parcel at 1481 Ocean Breeze Lane.

One of the more significant findings resulting from Rodamaker's research were board minutes revealing that in August of 1965 a county commissioner made a motion to buy approximately 4 acres of property from Overdown and Bessie Evans on which to locate a garbage pit.

Overdown Drive runs about a block away from the 1481 Ocean Breeze Lane property.

Jim Patrick, who would go on to have a long career with the Environmental Protection Agency, grew up across from Overdown Drive. He remembers going to a nearby dump, known locally as the Overdown Dump, to shoot rats.

He also recalled watching as crews sprayed diesel fuel on the garbage so they could burn it.

"There's no telling what all they were burning," he said. "Everything in the world got dumped over there."

He said the landfill the Rodamakers believed they uncovered "was way bigger than 6 acres" and wasn't the only one in the area.

"The county knew what was going on. The county commissioners and everyone else knew what was going on," he said.

The property on what is now Ocean Breeze Lane was subdivided and exchanged ownership many times in the years after the 1970s era that it reportedly operated as a dump.

In previous reporting, the News Journal was able to link Alta Skinner, owner of 13.02 acres in Santa Rosa County until 1978, to the Ocean Breeze Lane property. Skinner appeared before the County Commission on May 11, 1971 to request the county build a road onto her property.

"She donated the right of way for the road and is also permitting the county to use property owned by her for a sanitary landfill, at no cost to the county," the recorded minutes from that meeting state. "The Board assured Mrs. Skinner they would start work on the road within the next few weeks."

The parcel appears to have been subdivided into a 6.51-acre parcel in 1978 by Walter and Marie Harris, who purchased Skinner's property that year. Andrew McCreary is listed in Santa Rosa Property Appraiser records as buying the land in 1979 and selling it to the Rodamakers in 2019.

At present, the land now owned by Talon Investments is zoned R1, Single Family Residential.  This zoning allows for construction of up to four dwelling units per acre when designed as a residential subdivision, according to Santa Rosa County Planning Director Shawn Ward.

The Planning Department has no regulations prohibiting the allowance of residential housing, Ward said, and he said he would "advise future homeowner’s to do their due diligence" regarding any location at which they intend to settle.

Parker, the county's longest-tenured commissioner, said he had a vague recollection of the Rodamaker property and the discussions held after the couple uncovered trash beneath it.

Commission Chairman Colten Wright, who represents the Gulf Breeze area, recalled the issues raised by the Rodamakers but was hesitant to speak on the record about them because, he said, he was not on the county governing board at the time.

The new owner of the property, Talon Investments Inc., maintains an office on State Road 87 in Navarre, but a woman at that office Wednesday said William "Bill" Heslin, the primary managing partner, was out of town and doesn't work from the Navarre location.

The woman expressed surprise when notified there are indications the parcel at 1481 Ocean Breeze Lane had at one time functioned as a landfill.

Abbey Rodamaker said she wouldn't be shocked to learn the investment company was unaware what lies below the ground at the property they bought.

"You can't tell there's anything below the ground any more," she said. "The trees are all grown up."

Though it is unknown what Talon Investments plans for the Gulf Breeze property might be, the group Save Our Soundside has been actively monitoring the sale since it occurred in early January.

Member Elizabeth Pavelick has obtained from the DEP and Florida Department of Health a summary of permitting that could be required before residential development could take place and might hinder the opportunity to develop if the ground beneath the soil is as contaminated as the Rodamakers maintain that it is.

Contractors would need a construction permit and an environmental resource protection of wetlands and storm water permit if jurisdictional wetlands will be impacted. The same permit would be required if the developer wants to add 4,000 square feet of impervious surface subject to vehicle traffic or 9,000-square-feet of total impervious surfaces.

Permits for any proposed development over three single family homes would be processed by the Northwest Florida Water Management District.

A developer would be required to demonstrate any proposed work would not cause or contribute to violations of state water quality standards or cause either onsite or offsite flooding issues.

Permits would be needed to extend a public water system and a sewer permit would be necessary to obtain connection permission. Septic tanks are required to be placed at least 4 feet below the surface of the ground.

Consultation with the DEP is also required before conducting activities at a closed solid waste disposal facility.

Pavelick said Save Our Soundside has been monitoring activity at the old Rodamaker property since the couple discovered the garbage beneath their land. Four members of the group's board, she said, live within 2,500 feet of the Ocean Breeze Lane parcel.

"We all have been paying attention to what happens here. Sadly, almost every time we go out, one of us sees something distressing," Pavelick said. "We had hoped that no one would purchase the Rodamaker property. We didn't want to see anyone go through the emotional and financial stress that Abbey and Jeff went through."

She said the group had gone so far as to send a packet to the county suggesting it purchase the property and turn it into a conservation/preservation area.

This article originally appeared on Pensacola News Journal: Gulf Breeze Ocean Breeze Lane landfill property sold to developer