Golfers finally can tee off at course built on landfill

Thursday, July 21, 2011  03:09 AM

By Collin Binkley

THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH


 

 Twice in the past three years, officials had planned a grand opening for a golf course built atop a Gahanna landfill, only to be thwarted by delays.

Not this time.

Golfers will take their first swings today at the Golf Village at Central Park, a 52-acre, $18 million course in the southeastern part of the city funded by six government agencies and several private investors.

Some of the close-cropped hills that roll toward the Outerbelt still are thinly grassed, and swaths of earth had yet to be sodded yesterday, but the course otherwise has been transformed from landfill to leisure venue.

"It took a long time for us to get to this point because it was so complex," said Anthony Jones, Gahanna development director.

Work to clean the site and make way for the course began in 2005, after then-Franklin County Treasurer Richard Cordray turned over ownership of the Bedford Landfill to the Central Ohio Community Improvement Corp., a nonprofit development organization.

By granting the property transfer, the county could forgive $245,000 in back taxes from Claycraft Brick, which operated at the site before it went out of business.

Shifting ground and other setbacks, however, pushed the 2008 opening to the spring of 2010. Then that season came and went with the links still unfinished.

"When you're dealing with an environmental liability like a landfill and all the requirements of making it capped and clean and secure, there are unexpected things that arise," Jones said.

The course couldn't open last year because touchy weather - sometimes too wet, sometimes too dry - stunted grass growth, said Barry Fromm, chief executive of Value Recovery Group, the project's lead private investor.

That was a year after a leaky irrigation basin drained the water needed to feed the grass, requiring workers to install a liner.

Then there was an issue with the prized clubhouse and pub, originally to be built in a train depot that Fromm owns in Marion County. When officials decided to build a replica rather than pay $1 million to take apart, transport and reassemble the depot, Fromm wasn't onboard.

"I just contributed it," said Fromm, who is an admirer of vintage railroad items and paid to bring his depot to the course. "I don't care about getting paid for it."

The course has a driving range, putting course and nine holes that take about an hour and a half to complete and are geared toward time-cramped businesspeople and families. It has no trees because it's on a capped landfill, and offers an unencumbered view south.

"What makes it unique is you're hitting balls into the skyline of Columbus," said Steve Renaker, president of TGM Golf and Management, which leases the land and operates the golf course.

"In the end of the day, this is going to be one of Gahanna's premier assets," Jones said.