Castle Douglas Golf Club could be left with a bill for hundreds of thousands of pounds to tackle contaminated land.
Part of the course had been used by the former Stewartry District Council for landfill before being bought by the club in the 1980s.
After discovering the land was contaminated in 2014, Dumfries and Galloway Council took on liability and allocated £500,000 to dealing with the problem.
But a court ruling in Wales that is no longer the case, putting the onus back on the club.
Members of the council’s economy, environment and infrastructure committee will be told on Tuesday that the golf club say they do not have the cash needed to carry out the remedies proposed by the council.
Soil samples in 2014 showed the land on part of the course “showed levels of contaminants above current guideline levels for human health risks”. Since then the area has been mothballed.
The council discovered there wasn’t enough capping on parts of the site to protect against contact with waste and further investigations had been due to take place last spring.
However, a briefing note for Tuesday’s meeting claims the council and the golf club couldn’t come to a legal agreement on the matter.
And in August the council was made aware of a ruling at the Court of Appeal that meant they were no longer liable to clear up the pollution and the onus was back on the golf club.
The matter is being appealed to the Supreme Court but in the meantime the council has allocated the £500,000 to other projects.
The report for Tuesday says golf club representatives say they have “insufficient resources to undertake the remediation as proposed by the council”.
However, report author Shona Haddow, from the council’s graduate assets infrastructure team, says that as the club is a community amateur sports club they “must use their money to promote participation and provide facilities for their eligible sport to maintain their CASC status.
“This would not prevent using profits to remediate the land.”
The report adds that the council had planned to use excess material from the zero waste park in Dumfries to deal with the problem.
