For most of the last decade, the fear along the back fences of Woodlea Manor was the same one: what happens once that golf course behind holes 4, 5, and 6 finally shuts down for good? Loudoun County already answered that question, and it did so back in 2022, not this spring. When the county bought all three parcels that made up the old Westpark Golf Club, it placed the land into a conservation easement. That single legal step means the fairways behind those streets cannot become townhomes, cannot become a shopping center, cannot become anything beyond what a passive park allows. The redevelopment worry that circulated for years was settled before most residents noticed it had been decided.
What actually consumed the Board of Supervisors this April was smaller, louder, and far more specific: chains hitting metal poles.
The argument that actually happened
At the April 21, 2026 Board of Supervisors meeting, county staff came in expecting to close out design work on a 134-acre passive park, three miles of trails, a restored stretch of Dry Mill Branch, two pavilions, and an 18-hole disc golf course. What they got was a live demonstration. A resident named Karen Pantas walked to the podium and hit a disc golf basket with a frisbee, letting the chains rattle through the boardroom so supervisors could hear exactly what she was worried about. She told the board the sport is "inherently noisy" and said it would disturb children's naps and rattle anxious dogs.
Board Chair Phyllis Randall said she understood the concern and admitted she "would not like to live near a disc golf course" herself. Leesburg District Supervisor Kristen Umstattd, whose district includes Woodlea Manor, acknowledged it was "one of the best illustrations" she had seen in the boardroom, and the board used it to justify real changes to the plan rather than waving the concern away.
What actually changed because of that demonstration
The board didn't scrap the disc golf course. It engineered around the noise. The endorsed design, as posted on the county's Westpark project page, now requires:
- A minimum of 100 feet between any disc golf basket and an adjacent residential property line
- Additional native plantings around any basket that falls within 125 feet of a home
- Enhanced buffer plantings between residential lots and the parking areas on Clubhouse Drive and Country Club Drive, built to the Town of Leesburg's strictest landscape buffer standard
- Sand-filled basket posts, meant to dampen the vibration when a disc strikes the pole
- Padded sleeves on the chains themselves, to quiet the exact sound Pantas demonstrated
None of this was in the original concept. It exists because one resident made the abstract concrete in front of the people who could change it.
The other number that moved: $29.14 million
The design fight wasn't the only thing that shifted this year. When the county first budgeted Westpark under the FY 2026 Capital Improvement Program, the number was $18.9 million. By the time staff finished 50 percent construction documents and ran the numbers again, the estimate had climbed to $29.14 million, according to the board's own March 10, 2026 docket. That gap, just over $10 million, came from site conditions discovered during design work and the added scope of restoring 12 acres of wetlands and roughly 5,400 linear feet of stream channel along Dry Mill Branch, work that wasn't fully priced into the original budget.
The county isn't covering all of that increase out of the general fund. A Stormwater Local Assistance Fund grant worth $4,140,190 is expected to offset part of the cost, but that money comes with a real deadline: final stamped plans and specifications have to reach the state's Department of Environmental Quality by September 30, 2026, less than two months from now. If that paperwork slips, so does the funding.
When equipment actually shows up
Timelines on this project moved even in the weeks around that vote. The materials the county circulated just before April 21 pointed to a summer 2026 construction start with completion by fall 2027. The schedule posted right after the endorsement pushes the start to this fall, with completion now estimated for spring 2028, about half a year later than what was on the table just weeks earlier. That slip tracks with the budget story: more wetland restoration and more stream work meant more design time before anyone could break ground.
For anyone keeping an eye on daily disruption once work starts, the county's own traffic estimate for the finished park is modest: about five vehicle trips during the morning commute, ten during the evening commute, and roughly 90 total trips on a typical weekday. That's a passive park's worth of activity, not a stadium's.
What was never actually at risk
Here's the detail that gets lost in most conversations about Westpark: the county did not buy every acre of the old golf resort. An 8.2-acre parcel that once held the Westpark Hotel remains privately owned and sits outside the conservation easement entirely. It's still subject to standard Town of Leesburg zoning, which means it's the one piece of this footprint that theoretically could see a different kind of proposal down the road. The golf course itself is permanently off the table for redevelopment. That separate hotel parcel is the one piece of the old Westpark story that isn't finished yet.
If your street backs onto it
Woodlea Manor is 467 single-family homes built between 1989 and 1997 by NV Homes, Winchester Homes, and Pulte, and several of its streets look directly out over what used to be holes 4, 5, and 6. The neighborhood's HOA runs its own clubhouse, a pool, and two courts that do double duty for tennis and pickleball, and the Woodlea Watermocs still compete each summer in the Old Dominion Swim League, the same league residents' kids have splashed through for years. None of that changes with what's happening next door. What does change, over the next 18 months or so, is the view: fewer overgrown fairways, more marked trails, a restored stream corridor, and, eventually, the low background hum of discs hitting padded chains a football field's length away from the nearest yard.
The mailer that landed in more than 400 nearby addresses last fall wasn't the last word on this project, and it won't be the last time the design changes based on what residents actually notice once the equipment arrives. If you want to keep tabs on construction milestones as they happen, the county has a sign-up for direct project updates on its Westpark page, and WTOP's coverage of the April vote is worth bookmarking if you'd rather read the meeting minutes than sit through the video.
Whatever ends up growing in over Dry Mill Branch, the neighborhood behind it isn't going anywhere, and neither is the conversation about what belongs so close to the fence line.
If you're weighing what any of this means for a home along Clubhouse Drive or Country Club Drive, whether you're staying put or just curious what the changing view might mean for your property, I'm always happy to talk through it. Reach out to Chrissie Goodrum any time, or Request Your Home Valuation to see where things stand today.
