President Donald Trump appears to be teeing up another Reflecting Pool fiasco with his bid to renovate a DC golf course sitting at sea level.
Mother Jones writer Stephanie Mencimer said Trump’s bird’s-eye view of a municipal golf course at East Potomac Park, known to locals as Hains Point, is hiding from him the scale of the project he’s adopted — and its water hazard.
Trump wants to transform the local links into a world-class golf course worthy of PGA tournaments, saying construction on the new course will begin September 1. But Mencimer said any local with a fishing pole can see the problem with this plan.
“Let’s be honest,” said Rebecca Miller, executive director of the DC Preservation League, which has sued the Trump administration over its plans for the golf course. “The island is sinking.”
The environmental realities of East Potomac present major obstacles to Trump’s endless, badly planned ambition. Ed Stierli, Vice President of Government Affairs at the National Parks Conservation Association, says when he saw the early renderings of Trump’s course, “One of the first questions I had was: Are they completely ignoring the landscape here?”
“The simple answer is yes,” said Mencimer. “Much of East Potomac lies at sea level within a 100-year floodplain, and various studies have found that the artificial island has sunk at least five feet since its inception. Meanwhile, the water level around it has risen more than two feet thanks to climate change and other contributors. Today, it’s not uncommon for the river to top the seawall and come up 25 feet inland after a big storm or high tide, leaving picnic tables marooned like rafts on a small lake.”
The Potomac River already so regularly floods local sidewalks that it has drowned the city’s dreams of a modern swimming facility. And Mencimer and landscapers say it will surely wash out Trump’s golf fantasy and escalate the president’s losing battle against water with the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.
“Good grief,” said Mark Mungeam, the president of the American Society of Golf Course Architects, who is familiar with Trump’s plans but was unaware of the extent of the sinking. “That speaks to the folly of this project.”
Making matters worse is years of underfunding and neglect by Congress, which has left the nearly 150-year-old seawall surrounding the East Potomac Park crumbling. The sidewalk that runs around the perimeter of the 2-mile-long peninsula has already tumbled into the water in many places and is fenced off for safety reasons.
“For years, Republicans in Congress have starved all national parks for funding, creating a backlog of more than $2 billion in needed repairs just in DC. But in 2020, it passed the Great American Outdoors Act to try to address the neglect. Even the $500 million the bill allocated for projects related to the National Mall ahead of America 250, though, wasn’t enough to save East Potomac Park from being swallowed up by the river,” wrote Mencimer.
And it does not help that the whole island is composed of dredgings and waste soil with “a very high water table,” according to Peter Feldman, a hydrologist who did a stint at EPA working on the Superfund program. Putting a golf course there, he says, “would seem to be a poor idea generally.”
When the city tried to upgrade the aging facility on the island it had to watch sump pumps, get gulped down by the island’s soupy soils and excavations that caved in and threatened workers’ safety. Ultimately, the city lost $14 million in taxpayer money,
And if Trump’s “hasty and ill-conceived construction” fills in too much of East Potomac Park, Mencimer said the chronic flooding will simply move elsewhere, possibly even to nearby parts of the National Mall, such as the Jefferson Memorial, where taxpayers just spent more than $100 million rebuilding the seawall.
And when the Trump administration fails—and it will—advocates like Save East Po consultant Alex Rosen says Trump will “dig a bunch of plumbing, they will move a ton of earth, and they will make a bunch of changes” before realizing the water table will beat them.
If that happens, Rosen predicts the administration will “throw their hands up and say ‘oops, our bad’ and leave behind a big, expensive mess that renders East Potomac unusable long after Trump leaves office.”
