LONGWOOD, Fla. -- For the first time in several years, hundreds of homeowners in southwestern Seminole County can stop worrying about new development on land that used to be the Rolling Hills golf course.

On Tuesday, Seminole County commissioners unanimously approved a measure that keeps plans for a new public park moving forward.

The property sits just north of Altamonte Springs, near the I-4/State Road 434 interchange.

When the old Rolling Hills golf course shut down a few years ago, investors bought the land to build new homes on the property. A plan for the county to buy the land and turn it into a public park hit a snag last year when inspections revealed chemicals, like arsenic, in the soil.  The chemicals were likely from nearly 100 years of fertilizing.

 

 

On Tuesday, county commissioners approved their plans to buy the property, contingent upon homeowners paying much of the cost of cleaning up the contaminated soil. Property owners who live closest to the golf course land pay the most.

“They owe it to us to keep it the way it is to provide for us what we purchased, you know, what we’ve been paying taxes on,” said Aimee Ray, a homeowner who lives next to the old golf course.

Ray says paying a few hundred dollars over the course of the next 20 years is well worth keeping the land open and undeveloped.

“My husband and I moved from downtown Orlando, because we wanted to move away from the hustle and bustle and the houses right next door to other houses.”

The county could close the land deal and begin work on the new park as early as this summer.