Oyster Bay Settlement Preserves Peninsula Golf Course

After nearly six years of legal battles, community organizing, and a looming threat of 150 new homes, the Peninsula Golf Course in East Massapequa is staying exactly what it has always been.

The Town of Oyster Bay reached a settlement with Peninsula Golf Club last week that permanently blocks development on the 50-acre, nine-hole course. The Town Board approved the agreement unanimously on March 24, rezoning the land from residential to recreational use and requiring it to remain a golf course. The club has 60 days to execute the terms.

For the residents of Nassau Shores who spent years fighting to protect the property, the news landed as a genuine relief.

“The No. 1 goal was to maintain the golf course as open land and to prevent development,” said John Guerriero, president of the Nassau Shores Civic Association, which became one of the loudest voices in the preservation effort. “It’s a jewel of the neighborhood and also serves as an important flood buffer.”

That flood buffer piece is not a minor detail. The course sits in a low-lying coastal area that took a serious hit during Superstorm Sandy in 2012. Open land in that part of Nassau County absorbs water. Paved driveways, rooftops, and cul-de-sacs do not. Guerriero put it plainly when describing what 150 new homes would have meant for the surrounding streets. “With the infrastructure issues in Nassau Shores, it just wouldn’t be able to support another 150 homes,” he said.

The dispute started taking shape in 2021, when rumors spread that P.G.C. Holding Corp., the course’s parent company, had fielded an offer from a Florida-based developer interested in subdividing the land into exactly that number of single-family homes. The Nassau Shores Civic Association said shareholders had voted to approve a sale that included a provision awarding them an additional $60 million if the land were later developed, a structure that made it essentially impossible for the town to compete with a straightforward $4.4 million purchase offer.

The town tried to rezone the property to recreational use without a purchase, but the owners refused. By 2024, Oyster Bay had filed a petition in Nassau County court to seize the property through eminent domain. That legal pressure, combined with years of community advocacy, eventually brought both sides to the table.

The settlement now gives the town the right to pursue eminent domain if the restrictions are ever violated, and it holds the right of first refusal if the property is offered for sale. New deed agreements tied to the land strengthen protections that Nassau County originally put in place when it sold the property back in 1946 with restrictions requiring it to remain a golf course. Those original protections were never guaranteed to hold forever. The new ones carry more weight.

Oyster Bay Supervisor Joseph Saladino called the outcome a win for the community on multiple fronts. “This is great news for our community as we are permanently protecting this open space from development while saving the millions it would cost to acquire it,” he said.

For a town that has watched open land disappear steadily over the decades, locking in 50 acres of green space without spending public money on an acquisition is a meaningful result. The rezoning alone removes the development pathway that made the fight so urgent in the first place.

The civic association deserves credit for staying engaged through what became a long and complicated process. Mobilizing residents, keeping pressure on local officials, and making the environmental and infrastructure case publicly over several years is the kind of sustained community effort that rarely gets celebrated the way a ribbon-cutting does. But it works.

The immediate threat is gone. The course will stay a course. For the families in Nassau Shores who worried about traffic, flooding, and the slow erosion of their neighborhood’s character, spring arrives this year with at least one less thing to lose sleep over.

What happens next will depend partly on the condition of the property itself. Some residents have pointed to longstanding concerns about the site’s upkeep, and attention is expected to shift in that direction now that the development question is settled.