In her home nestled on Southeast 23rd Lane, Conjwanna Robinson had a family and three decades of history — but the Florence Landfill was enough to make her want to pack up her life and leave. She wasn’t alone.
A now-resolved legal challenge over the site arose by 2023, delivering an unlikely messenger to her doorstep. Former Alachua County Commissioner Robert Hutchinson, another neighbor, had come knocking, sent with a letter and an objective from the site’s owner, Paul Florence.
They hoped Robinson would withdraw her name from the challenge in exchange for a favor.
Run by Paul Florence, the landfill arose from the tumultuous history of two previous owners prone to illegal dumping. It dated back to the 1960s, long before the site took on its current name. Residents of the Kincaid Loop — a rectangle formed by Southeast 15th Street, Southeast 41st Avenue and Southeast 27th Street — were united against the hazardous waste next door.
By 1994, Alachua County officials had cast out the site’s previous owner, Renfroe, and tapped Paul Florence to handle the mess. His special use permit, or SUP, awarded him five years and two additional feet of dirt and debris.
Now, over two decades later, the 35-foot-tall construction and demolition, or C&D, landfill has shrouded the Kincaid Loop in a divisive shadow.
Though it houses the Florence site, Southeast Gainesville is also the center of the city’s multi-generational Black community. For some residents, the dumping signifies a pillar of environmental injustice, spurring the now-resolved legal challenge and protests from the “Dump the Dump” movement.
However, the conservation-minded locals of Woodbine and Flamingo Hammock have grown close with Paul Florence. They say he’s responsible compared to Renfroe, and to them, a good neighbor.
An ‘adversarial situation’
Robinson learned of the landfill after settling into her home three decades ago. Since then, her sister’s car was nearly backed over by a Florence truck, and Robinson developed sinus problems.
A thick layer of dust from unpaved roads coated every structure near her home, including a neon “Dump the Dump” sign. It’s unclear how much of that dust originated from the landfill just south, but the 57-year-old still saw her repeated infections as a sign something was amiss.
“I had all kinds of thoughts going through my head once I found out,” she said, fiddling with her gold rings. “What am I breathing?”
The county commission greenlit Paul Florence to double the mound’s height to 70 feet in 2018, but he withdrew the application in response to resident outcry. He refiled again in 2021. When the FDEP indicated it would give Paul Florence the final go-ahead, Robinson was among 14 residents who launched a legal challenge against the state permit.
It wasn’t long before the letters arrived.
Some of the petitioners said a manila envelope arrived by mail, but Robinson, like several others, was met with Hutchinson at her front door.
The envelope he handed her included a letter signed by Paul Florence dated May 5, 2023. It also contained a list of “things done to help others without charge” and a legal withdrawal form pre-filled with Robinson’s name, she said.
“We would much rather fund community projects and provide services to the people living in our own area than spend many thousands of dollars on lawyers and consultants,” the letter read.
Paul Florence declined to comment.
The letter offered 30 numbered favors, including internet installation, linking homes to city water, paving streets and donating “funds, equipment and hauling” to Showers of Blessings Church, which also neighbors the landfill.
Four bullet points highlighted the nonprofit Alachua Conservation Trust, for which his team demolished buildings and cleared debris, accepted trash, hauled roll-off dumpsters and helped fund a Brush Fire Truck for controlled burns.
Robinson said she snatched the envelope and turned Hutchinson away, watching him head straight to another petitioner's home. It was a “scare tactic” and bribery, she said, which five petitioners succumbed to.
“What else would you call it? ” she laughed grimly. “Call a snake, a snake.”
The nine remaining challengers reached a settlement with Paul Florence last June, knocking the landfill’s permitted height to 65 feet and adding an 8-foot strip of land to buffer noise and dust. It allowed residents to directly contact Paul Florence with complaints of a rotten egg odor — hydrogen sulfide gas likely seeping from decomposing drywall — and provided funds for well water filtration systems on four different properties.
Those wells, along with Boulware Springs, will also undergo private water tests annually.
When told the petitioners felt intimidated by the letter of favors, Hutchinson, a Flamingo Hammock resident, was taken aback. Paul Florence’s intentions were positive, he said, an effort to assuage the residents’ concerns outside an “adversarial situation.”
He described his relationship with Paul Florence as “whatever one friend would do for another” and, during his three terms on the county commission, voted to renew the landfill’s SUP at least twice.
Following years of scrutiny toward the site, Hutchinson said its owner has an unwarranted bad reputation. Paul Florence maintains close communication with Woodbine and Flamingo Hammock residents, who Hutchinson described as “relatively wealthy, white, educated environmentalists.”
“Who else would you want to have living around a dump than us?” he said. “We watch that thing like a hawk.”
A ‘decent businessman’
Off Southeast 32nd Place, the sandy path through Sherri Boyd Amundson’s property wound past cabbage palms and “tortoise crossing” signs. It was a tract of land dedicated primarily to longleaf pine restoration, a shared goal among her neighbors.
Her property also spans most of the Florence site’s southern border, but beyond the hill-like embankment that blocks most sound and sight of “the action,” only the low hum of dump trucks rings through her trees.
After settling into her home in 1988, Amundson said the “slimeball” Renfroe Landfill was still running. The 71-year-old and her now ex-husband, an environmental lawyer, fought “tooth and nail” to shut it down.
Since Paul Florence took control, he’s grown roots in Woodbine and Flamingo Hammock, home to career environmental engineers, lawyers, botanists and hydrologists, among others. Most were formally affiliated with UF, some recognized as stewards of conservation.
They also frequently wrote letters and attended county meetings in favor of the landfill.
To Amundson, Paul Florence both cleaned up Renfroe’s mess and ran the site responsibly. He connected her home to city water at no charge and shut down his grumbling trucks when she hosted gatherings. One time, his crew brought equipment and dug a trench on her property.
She baked cookies for them.
“If I need something that I don’t have like an egg or sugar … you call your neighbor, right?” Amundson said. “Same with Paul.”
The site’s signature smell invades her property “every once in a while,” but she said a quick call to Paul Florence handles it. The Alachua County Department of Health tested hydrogen sulfide levels sporadically after complaints from March 2024 through January this year. Of 304 samples, eight returned above the maximum risk level, though nowhere near readings that cause illness, according to a DOH-Alachua administrator.
Upon proposals of a height expansion, Paul Florence showed her his side of the fence and pointed to a flag that marked how high the pile would be. She didn’t mind the prospect of another 30 feet — but she did mind the protestors.
Amundson felt familiar with activism after three decades in public schools working to close economic disparities and four years on the county planning board, but she couldn’t empathize with the “Dump the Dump” movement.
“Be an activist. Don’t just gripe and complain,” she said, squinting behind round-framed glasses.
Sharing the Kincaid Loop with a landfill wasn’t her first choice, but she doesn’t mind the Florence crew next door, not after their effort to rectify what came before.
On the landfill’s northern border, 51-year-old Leah Cohen joined the Woodbine mix in the early 2010s. Her land was riddled with garbage, which Paul Florence provided a dumpster for.
Chatter of SUP renewals and commission meetings swept through Woodbine like wildfire, she said, prompting her and her husband to write their first letter of support for Paul Florence about 15 years ago. They had only ever heard he was a good neighbor – the kind that paves roads and brings tools at a moment’s notice.
Then Cohen met residents outside of the tight-knit network of Woodbine. She worried little about contaminated water or toxicity, but “power imbalances” began to take shape for her.
“The resources that Paul Florence was providing to Woodbine members, I don’t believe that they were provided to every neighbor,” she said.
Southeast Gainesville holds multiple former dump sites. In 2017, the NAACP and Clean Air Task Force found Black Americans were 75% more likely to live in “fence-line” communities, which border facilities with noticeable “noise, odor, traffic, and chemical emissions,” a statistic listed as a symptom of environmental racism.
Cohen said Paul Florence requested another recommendation letter in 2023. She refused.
“The residents who have been here for many generations don’t want this,” she said. “The [county] commission should be listening.”
Cohen shared her doubts with other Woodbine residents last year, who she said thanked her for raising concern but continued advocating for Florence’s operation.
The dirt road forward
Neon “Dump the Dump” signs line Southeast 15th Street, forming a breadcrumb trail that seems to follow 50-year-old Brackin Camp everywhere she goes.
She described herself as a bridge to long-time residents rather than a true community member, though she arrived in Southeast Gainesville five years ago and was a petitioner in the legal challenge alongside Robinson.
A year before the settlement, Camp took a tour of the landfill. She and two other petitioners ascended the mound in the back of a pick-up truck. Debris was crunched and compacted by heavy machinery, the smell “horrific” in the heat. Camp thought Paul Florence offered a look in hopes of changing her mind, she said, but it only reinforced her worry.
This year, her Toyota Prius clobbered over person-sized potholes as she stopped door to door with petitions and clacking stacks of yard signs, steadfast in her opposition.
Though now, after over two decades of SUP renewals, the county is on her side.
The Alachua County Commission filed a six-part motion Jan. 28 to steer the operation to an early close. It set a 60-day deadline to develop a hydrogen sulfide monitoring plan and review installing anti-truck signs, and a 90-day deadline to present an early closure plan for the site. The order also called for graphs of groundwater contamination data and for drywall debris to be diverted to a Palatka facility.
The motion’s final task requires the commission to send a letter to Gov. Ron DeSantis and the Florida Department of Environmental Protection advocating the landfill be shut down ahead of schedule.
The commission’s most recent SUP renewal in 2018 was intended to be the last, but a state emergency order for Subtropical System Nicole took authority over county power, breathing life into Paul Florence’s C&D operation through at least mid-2026.
During the Jan. 28 meeting, one commissioner expressed regret for voting in favor of the renewal seven years ago. Another praised Paul Florence as a responsible owner but still echoed the overwhelming sentiment of the room: It was time for the landfill to go.
An attorney for the operation threatened conflict during public comment, but for the sea of local protestors, the motion was a small victory.
Camp’s opposition was never about the quality of Paul Florence’s character, she said, but instead the unknown danger the site could pose for nearby residents and environment. It will close eventually, but she still questioned what will come after.
She said Paul Florence once told her he imagined the mound of C&D debris could become a park, the “highest point in the neighborhood where people can come see the stars.”
Contact Rylan DiGiacomo-Rapp at rdigiacomo-rapp@alligator.org. Follow her on X @rylan_digirapp.
Rylan DiGiacomo-Rapp is the enterprise environmental reporter and a third-year journalism and environmental science major. She has also worked as the metro editor, enterprise political reporter and metro news assistant. Outside of the newsroom, you can usually find her haunting local coffee shops.
