The Sustainability Playbook Hiding in a 1927 Golf Course

A 300-Acre Bet in the Middle of a Florida City

In 1927, a marshy stretch of Sarasota nicknamed Little Camp Sawgrass was drained and shaped into a golf course. Babe Ruth swung there. So did Bobby Jones, the man whose name stuck to the place (Fox 13 News). Nearly a century later, the city faced the question every municipality eventually faces about its aging recreational land: sell it, shrink it, or reimagine it.

Sarasota chose door number three. In January 2022, the city voted to restore the original 18-hole Donald Ross layout, hand the rest of the property back to water and wildlife, and lock the whole 307 acres into a conservation easement in perpetuity (Bobby Jones Golf Club). Twenty million dollars in bonds funded it, and golf revenue has covered the debt so far (Your Observer). Twenty acres of engineered wetlands now sit where fairways once ran, planted with native grasses and nutrient filtering species, fed by a weir that redirects stormwater off the streets and through the marsh before it reaches Roberts Bay (Fox 13 News). The land is doing three jobs at once: recreation, flood control, and water treatment. In July 2026, officials cut the ribbon on Phase 1 of the 110-acre nature park, the largest contiguous piece of green land inside city limits (Your Observer).

Eight miles away, the story ended differently. Rolling Green Golf Club, a 55-year-old course, sold for $8 million in 2018, got rezoned, and is becoming Gracewater at Sarasota, a gated community of nearly 500 villas and homes starting in the $500,000s, complete with a resort pool, pickleball courts, and a lifestyle manager who plans kayaking trips (Sarasota Magazine). Some sensitive land was spared. Most of it was not.

Neither outcome is a villain. One community bought a century of green space. The other bought housing supply in a market desperate for it. What separates them is not virtue; it is sequence. Sarasota decided what the land had to do before deciding what to build on it. That is the whole lesson, and it scales down to a single park, a schoolyard, or a vacant lot behind a rec center.

Design the Land to Work for a Living

The old model treated a recreational space as a stage and the environment as scenery. The better model asks the ground to earn its keep. Bioswales and permeable pavement turn a parking lot from a pollution funnel into a filter. Native plantings replace thirsty turf, which matters more than it sounds: large landscaped properties like parks and schools can spend as much as 30 percent of their total water use just keeping grass alive (U.S. EPA WaterSense). Cutting turf and choosing regionally appropriate species lowers the water bill, the mowing bill, and the fertilizer runoff at the same time (U.S. EPA).

Start smaller than you think you can. Pick one drainage problem on your site, the puddle that never dries, the corner that floods every August, and design the fix so it doubles as something people want to look at. A rain garden is cheaper than a retention pond and infinitely more pleasant to sit beside. Then measure something before and after, even crudely. Photographs of standing water, a water bill, a count of how many people use the space on a Saturday. Evidence is what turns a pilot into a policy.

Bring People In Early, Not for Approval Later

The fastest way to kill a sustainability project is to unveil it. Residents who first hear about a plan at a hearing arrive with one available response, which is opposition. Residents who helped shape the plan arrive as its advocates. When Rolling Green's development plans surfaced in 2018, neighbors were already upset, because by then the only thing left to do was object.

Practical version for anyone with a project and no budget: hold two listening sessions before you draw anything, ask what people already do on the land rather than what they want built, and publish what you heard alongside what you decided and why. That last step is the one everyone skips, and it is the one that buys trust. Partner with a local land trust, watershed group, or high school environmental club, and suddenly you have volunteers, credibility, and a monitoring team. Big Waters Land Trust holds the easement over the entire Bobby Jones property and is running a $3.5 million campaign to keep improving it, which means the city's commitment now outlives any single election cycle (Your Observer).

Let Technology Do the Boring Work

Smart irrigation controllers, soil moisture sensors, and simple usage counters are no longer exotic. They answer questions that used to be settled by argument. Which fields are actually overwatered. When the trail is busiest. Whether the new wetland is holding water the way the engineer promised. A WaterSense labeled controller alone can save roughly 24 gallons a day on a moderate landscape (U.S. EPA WaterSense). Multiply that across a municipal park system and you have funded your next planting season.

Creative design does the same trick with space. Green roofs on field houses, wildlife corridors along fence lines, community gardens on the strip nobody could ever mow properly. Multifunctional land is how small sites compete with large ones.

Write the Rules So Good Decisions Are the Easy Ones

Individual champions burn out. Policy does not. Local governments can require green space in new development, set performance standards for stormwater and irrigation, offer fee reductions for projects that exceed them, and fold recreation into comprehensive land use planning instead of treating it as leftover acreage. Sarasota paired its bond with grants from the Southwest Florida Water Management District and the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, then added $1.67 million in park impact fees for refinements (Fox 13 News; Your Observer). None of those dollars were exotic. They were stacked deliberately.

The stakes are not abstract. Seventy-six percent of residents in the 100 largest U.S. cities now live within a ten minute walk of a park, an all time high, up from 68 percent in 2012 (Trust for Public Land). That still leaves more than 100 million Americans, including 28 million children, without one (Trust for Public Land). Meanwhile the land is in play right now: roughly 90 golf courses closed nationally in a single recent year, and more courses have closed than opened every year since 2006 (National Golf Foundation; Natural Lands). Every one of those properties becomes either a subdivision or a preserve, and that outcome is decided in rooms that are often half empty.

Your Move

Sarasota's wetland will still be filtering stormwater when everyone who voted for it has retired. That is the strange gift of land decisions: they outlast the people who make them, which means they are made by whoever bothers to show up.

So find the room. If you lead an organization, put one sustainability question on your next agenda and assign it a name and a date. If you are early in your career, you have the most underrated asset in the building, which is the willingness to ask why a space was designed this way. Pick one patch of ground you can influence, a schoolyard, a courtyard, a neglected half acre behind the parking lot, and ask what else it could be doing. Then say it out loud to someone with a budget.

A century from now, somebody will walk that ground. The only question is what you left them.

Bibliography

Bobby Jones Golf Club. "Our Rich History." Accessed August 8, 2026. https://www.bobbyjonesgolfclub.com/our-rich-history/.

Fox 13 News. "Revamped Bobby Jones Golf Club and Nature Park to Help Keep Sarasota Waters Cleaner." December 14, 2023. https://www.fox13news.com/news/revamped-bob-jones-golf-club-and-nature-park-to-help-keep-sarasota-waters-cleaner.

National Golf Foundation. "Golf Supply Update: More Openings, Fewer Closings." Accessed August 8, 2026. https://www.ngf.org/short-game/golf-supply-update-more-openings-fewer-closings/.

Natural Lands. "From Par to Public Park." December 11, 2024. https://www.natlands.org/news/from-par-to-public-park/.

Sarasota Magazine. "A New Residential Development Will Replace Rolling Green Golf Club." October 5, 2023. https://www.sarasotamagazine.com/home-and-real-estate/2023/10/gracewater-sarasota-development.

Trust for Public Land. "Parks: The Great Unifiers." May 21, 2025. https://www.tpl.org/parks-the-great-unifiers-report.

Trust for Public Land. "ParkScore: About, Methodology, and FAQ." Accessed August 8, 2026. https://www.tpl.org/parkscore/about.

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. "Green Infrastructure." Accessed August 8, 2026. https://www.epa.gov/green-infrastructure.

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, WaterSense. "WaterSense at Work: Landscaping." May 2023. https://www.epa.gov/system/files/documents/2023-05/ws-commercial-watersense-at-work_Section_5.2_Landscaping.pdf.

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, WaterSense. "Water-Smart Solution for Larger Landscapes." March 24, 2017. https://19january2021snapshot.epa.gov/watersense/water-smart-solution-larger-landscapes_.html.

Warfield, Andrew. "A Good Walk Unspoiled: Bobby Jones Nature Park Marks Completion of Phase 1." Your Observer, July 16, 2026. https://www.yourobserver.com/news/2026/jul/16/bobby-jones-nature-park/.