Abbey and Jeff Rodamaker learned the hard way in 2019 that land they’d bought in the Gulf Breeze area had at one time been the site of what the Florida Department of Environmental Protection calls a “promiscuous dump.”
Now the same property is up for sale again, for about 10 times what the Rodamakers paid for it.
The 6.51-acre parcel at 1481 Ocean Breeze Lane has passed through a couple of hands since the Rodamakers were able to sell it the year after they bought it. Records show the parcel is presently owned by William Heslin and Talon Investments of Navarre.
Talon Investments paid $400,000 for the property in September 2023 and is marketing it for sale for $699,000 through Home Town Realty Partners.
Listed by agent Sarah Johnson, the acreage is being marketed as a place “to build your ultimate dream estate.”
“Offering unmatched privacy, this massive property features an impressive 5.87 acres of high and dry uplands,” an ad appearing on the realtor.com website states. “Design a sprawling family homestead with no HOA restrictions.”
It goes further to request investors or builders to also take note.
“This exceptional 6.51 acre parcel offers a perfect footprint for a high demand boutique subdivision of multi-home family compound,” the website information states.
Contacted by phone, Johnson told a reporter, “I have no comment for you,” and hung up. Calls to Talon Investments went unanswered.
Abbey Rodamaker said she’s stunned the land is back on the market.
“I was absolutely shocked to hear the property at 1481 Ocean Breeze had been listed … yet again,” she said in an email. “My understanding was this property was never to be developed, and was supposed to be flagged by the county due to the substantial list of state requirements and permits that ‘would be required’ should development ever be a consideration.”
The Rodamakers bought the Ocean Breeze Lane property for $70,000 with plans to build their dream home, but soon discovered that wasn’t to be.
According to Abbey, the term promiscuous dump was far too kind a term for what the Rodamakers uncovered.
They discovered what lay beneath the ground they’d bought while clearing trees from their planned future home site. Glass bottles, plastic containers, propane tanks and tires emerged from beneath the soil, caught up in the roots of the felled trees.
“It’s 6 acres of trash, 15 feet deep,” Abbey said in 2023. “We brought in an excavator and began digging holes 3 and 4 feet deep. There was nothing but trash and water. Trash and water everywhere.”
Her comments came after Talon Investments purchased the land. She said at that time she feared the property being sold for development without potential buyers being made aware of what they were getting. That is what had happened to her and her husband.
Heslin has disclosed some information about the property’s history in what is known as a Vacant Land Disclosure Form. On the last page of the several page document, under the heading of “other matters,” he wrote, “Parcel was an unofficial dump site in the 1960’s” and references a DEP report completed in January 2020.
He also disclosed that wells on the property need to be abandoned.
A second side of the Rodamakers’ dream home nightmare happened when they sought help to clean up the massive mess they’d uncovered.
“We couldn’t clean it up ourselves. It was beyond the scope of clearing. It would have been hundreds of thousands of dollars,” she commented for the 2023 article. “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 Rodamakers made certain to disclose everything they knew about the Ocean Breeze Lane property prior to selling it for $125,000 to local business owner Johnathon Hamby. Hamby told them he simply wanted to use the land to store equipment. He sold it three years later to Talon Investments and turned a substantial profit.
As sales marketing heats up again, one county department has stepped up to do what it can to inform the public about what a potential buyer can expect at 1481 Ocean Breeze Lane.
Some information about the property and its history are available via contact with the Santa Rosa County Planning and Development Office, according to department head Shawn Ward. What’s included consists of newspaper articles and other publicly accessible materials.
“We keep an alert file so that if anybody inquires, we can let them know there’s some history on this property,” Ward said. “That’s (property acquisitions) mostly outside of our purview, but we’re willing to do anything we can to help bring awareness.”
What’s been publicly disseminated is a great deal more than what might be found in a Vacant Land Disclosure Form or DEP status report.
After being stymied by the state and county following the 2019 purchase of the property, Rodamaker started to research things on her own to learn more about the land she owned and the history of the area she had moved to.
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.
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.
County records also showed 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 complaint came from another citizen worried about the condition of a garbage pit in the Santa Rosa Shores community.
Rodamaker’s research eventually 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.
The school district surprised many soon after when it withdrew its request for the rezoning.
Given what knowledge about the property is now available, Rodamaker said she finds it hard to believe it’s being marketed for sale again.
“In my opinion, the amount of waste present below the surface of that property, percolating in the groundwater for the last 50 years, makes that land unfit for anything except natural attenuation,” she said. “I find it appalling and frankly quite morally bankrupt for people to continue to buy and sell that land with the hopes of making a profit off buyers who are naive to the actual extent and current state of the waste present. It’s really shameful.”
She said current and previous owners, as well as the county share responsibility for irresponsible behavior.
“Santa Rosa County should have done the right thing and taken responsibility for the waste they allowed to be deposited there. Instead, they continue to allow people to profit off land that is unfit for human development,” she said. “When you know better, you have to do better. And both Santa Rosa County as well as the current and previous owners know better.”
Tom McLaughlin covers Santa Rosa County, environmental stories, development and investigative reporting.
This article originally appeared on Pensacola News Journal: Turns out, $700K Gulf Breeze property marketed as dream site is real dump
Reporting by Tom McLaughlin, Pensacola News Journal / Pensacola News Journal
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
By Tom McLaughlin, Pensacola News Journal | USA TODAY Network
