Rumors have been percolating in recent weeks that old abandoned oil wells lurking beneath Ocean Meadows Golf Course in Goleta might throw a monkey wrench into recently announced conservation plans for the nine-hole course. However, a spokesperson for the Trust for Public Land (TPL), the organization that is under contract to purchase the 63-acre parcel and, once the deal gets done, convert it back to its historical wetlands state, said this week that such speculation is unequivocally false.
Explaining that the two wells, located beneath the second and sixth holes, have been on TPL’s radar for quite a while and that they have long since been determined by the state to require no remediation (the wells, drilled by speculators many decades ago, actually never saw any oil in them), Paige Rausser, senior project manager at TPL, said, “Unfortunately for golfers, but good for us, this doesn’t impact the project at all.”