A gaggle of teenage boys stampeded through the woods in 1984. It was just beyond 15-year-old Johnell Gainey’s new home in Southeast Gainesville — a paradise for childhood imagination, for slingshots and BB guns and exploring in the summer heat.
There were plenty of targets, too. The boys shot their toy bullets at abandoned box TVs nestled in the underbrush and danced through a strange museum of decrepit refrigerators, kitchen stoves and “a car or two” laid to rest between the trees.
It was a playground of mystery, but Gainey didn’t mind. It was a while later when he realized his family’s bright blue house on Southeast 25th Avenue was squeezed beside an unforeseen enemy: an illegal dump.
“It got so bad,” Gainey, now 56, said. “We let it go for a long time. We probably should have said something way before.”
Two owners and four decades later, the dump transformed from a hazardous state violation to the Florence Landfill, a permitted construction and demolition, or C&D, site. Owned by Paul Florence, the operation has long been a point of contention in Southeast Gainesville neighborhoods, an area never intended to house a landfill.
As the site grew, residents who lived near Gainey complained of a smell like rotten eggs, dust, truck noise and worries of future health impacts. The weary wanted it gone.
Lawless beginnings
Alachua County didn’t discover the perilous state of Feagle Fill Dirt — the first of two predecessors for the Florence Landfill — until 1983, according to an FDEP historical report. The operation dated back to the late 1960s, a nearly two-decade-old assortment of hazardous waste dumped, buried, burned or left wading in flooded pits, the report said.
There were paint cans, chemical bottles, garbage from schools, old tires, plants, building materials, white goods — large appliances like those Gainey played among — and more left to rot on an unprotected swath of land.
Feagle Fill Dirt ultimately failed to follow state permits and a closure plan.
The site took on a new owner and name, Renfroe Landfill, by 1985, but its life was also short-lived and plagued by waves of violations. It wasn’t meant to shoulder more than C&D debris — materials considered water-insoluble and non-hazardous, like glass, concrete and untreated wood — but unexpected additions still made it into the mix, including household trash, mattresses, office materials and medical waste, according to a 1996 FDEP report.
The Renfroe Landfill’s special use permit, or SUP, was revoked by 1991, and the site sat static for four years. Alachua County officials approached Paul Florence with a proposition: buy the landfill, turn a short-term profit and clean up Renfroe’s mess.
Though the 1994 SUP allowed Paul Florence to pile on another two feet, it also sounded an alarm on the site’s incompatibility with Southeast Gainesville, an area zoned agriculturally and packed with family homes like Gainey’s. Florence was originally supposed to shut its doors by 1999, but that never happened.
Now, the unlined landfill peaks at 35 feet and still rumbles to life with truckloads of fresh debris, which totaled to over 30,000 tons in 2024.
Renewals for a ‘good neighbor’
The county commission has since renewed the Florence SUP six times in five-year increments. The last renewal was in 2018 and flashed a green light for the landfill to double its height to 70 feet.
However, Florence was met with opposition from local residents and withdrew the height expansion application. In 2021, the landfill refiled again, and residents returned with a challenge to the state permit.
The future height allowance was knocked down to 65 feet after Florence and the petitioners reached a settlement, which was resolved in June.
However, there were multiple other Florence neighbors who publicly encouraged the operation’s height increase in a 2018 county planning commission meeting and continue to do so. Mark Brown, a now 79-year-old retired environmental engineer, defended Paul Florence as exceedingly responsible.
Brown lives in Woodbine, a residential area with tracts of conservation land that shares Florence’s rightmost border. The residents remain in close contact with Paul Florence, who Brown described as a “good neighbor.”
“He had always lived up to any request we had to maintain that landfill in a really good condition,” he said.
Brown said he’s personally reviewed many of the landfill’s required water quality tests since he moved to Woodbine 10 years ago, and his surety in the safety of living next door still holds strong.
In the 2018 meeting, one commissioner recalled the management process of filling Florence dumpsters as “lovely,” and compared to Renfroe, it was. Paul Florence added a transfer station on Hawthorne Road to ensure debris would be properly sorted, had been communicative with the county — sometimes attending county meetings himself — and had built trust with conservation-minded neighbors like Brown.
Before the legal challenges, that SUP extension and height expansion was waved through unanimously, the matter closed by one last comment from a chuckling commission: “This must be the most popular dump in the world.”
By early 2024, that extension was set to expire, but a state emergency order for Subtropical System Nicole allowed C&D landfills to remain open for two years after the storm with an additional 24-month period. In short: it offered the promise of more time, a sense of security Paul Florence seized quickly. The order bypassed county power, guaranteeing the site life through at least mid-2026.
National disposal company Waste Pro absorbed Paul Florence’s company, Florence Recycling, last year, including the transfer station on Hawthorne Road. However, Paul Florence still owns the C&D landfill property.
Southeast Gainesville houses the site, which has also been home to much of the city’s Black community for generations. Throughout its historical struggle with food insecurity and underrepresentation, the area has seen multiple dump sites come and go. One even lies beneath an elementary school.
Gainey, who has found success in California with acting, modeling and stunt work, said he’s visited that blue house in Southeast Gainesville much more often than before. He stepped off the driveway and into the woods of his childhood, pressing past wide palm fronds and over a collapsed barbed wire fence. Atop a sandy mound, Gainey was met with a clear view of stagnant marsh and C&D debris in the distance.
A silver skull ring glinted on his right hand as he gestured toward the Florence Landfill, which could soon surpass the treeline at 65 feet. Though Paul Florence has worked toward righting the wrongs of past owners, Gainey still sees the site as another ever-present burden placed on the city’s Black community.
“That’s a powerful stigma,” he said. “That could be a mind crusher.”
Water in the ‘wild west’
Paynes Prairie, a marshland studded with rippling grasses and the grumbles of hidden alligators, is the gatekeeper of an unseen abyss. Tea-colored water is sucked from the prairie into the Alachua Sink, a 227-foot sinkhole touching the underlying Floridan aquifer, which feeds Boulware Springs’ chilled water bubbling back to the surface. Mixing with land runoff, the water follows its natural compass back to Paynes Prairie, and the cycle continues.
The Floridan aquifer is one the deepest, most extensive in the southeastern U.S. and delivers drinking water to much of the state, including Alachua County. It also indirectly touches the Florence Landfill.
C&D debris sites, though generally considered non-hazardous, often create signature liquid plumes that seep into the groundwater below. In the time between Renfroe and Florence in the early 90s, water tests uncovered similar plumes. Several violations that impact aesthetic qualities of drinking water and low levels of Chloroform — a volatile organic compound toxic to people — were found in site wells tapped into a shallow aquifer, according to a 1996 FDEP report.
The report found the shallow aquifer would likely feed the lower-lying Floridan aquifer as it journeyed west to Paynes Prairie, a sign any chemical leaching from the Florence Landfill could have far-reaching consequences. It emphasized the need to only add C&D materials to the mound that won’t disperse in water, as “this diligence should be a primary concern due to the absence of a liner beneath the facility.”
Now, the state and county require four annual water tests from each of the landfill’s wells, which were installed for monitoring. The county also enforces that private wells within a 1,000-foot radius be tested every two years since 2019, said Christopher Gilbert, Alachua County Hazardous Materials Program Manager.
“One of the reasons why they’ve got so many wells out here is that they identify and they deal with it long before it could become a public hazard,” he said.
However, Christopher McVoy — an outside expert from last year’s settlement — was less optimistic. Aside from his duties as a Lake Worth Beach city commissioner, McVoy studies soil physics, which overlaps considerably with hydrology.
Southeast Gainesville has a high water table, he said, so a landfill without a liner is almost guaranteed to leak.
The Feagle Fill Dirt and Renfroe operations were run like the “wild west,” McVoy said, and in a summary he wrote for the legal challenge, he voiced a lingering worry that some of the hazardous materials could have been overlooked during removal. Packing on another 30 feet of debris would also increase downward pressure, which he said would likely raise the risk of contamination.
Though it directly clashes with state statute, the Florence Landfill also falls within the region’s 100-year floodplain, an area susceptible to a 1% chance of significant flooding every year. If a major rush of water hit the area, it could cause a washout of chemicals or debris to rush toward Paynes Prairie, he said.
“That could happen in one or two people’s lifetimes,” he said. “Probably ought to pay some attention to that.”
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.
