For five months, if you brought up Pelican Bay in a conversation with anyone paying attention, you got asked about tennis courts. Specifically, whether seven of them at Naples Grande Beach Resort were about to become water slides. There were petitions, a GoFundMe, two days of packed meetings in March, and a Collier County Commissioners session that drew nearly a hundred residents. Then in May, the fight ended the way most zoning fights end: with a withdrawal and no explanation beyond "for now."
The tennis courts are still tennis courts. Meanwhile, on the other side of the neighborhood, a different kind of change had already happened without a single hearing you could have attended.
The Fight That Ended Where It Started
The proposal had a name, Clam Pass Cove, and a footprint: roughly 3.3 acres on the resort's east side, where seven tennis courts would give way to a lazy river, two water slides between 21 and 25 feet tall, a children's splash pool, and a café. Naples Grande called it an amenity. Its neighbors called it a water park, and the distinction mattered because Pelican Bay's own mission documents are built around language promising an "ambiance of quiet beauty."
Here's how the year actually moved:
- December 2025: Naples Grande submits pre-application plans. Opposition organizes fast across Seagate, Naples Cay, and three Pelican Bay neighborhoods bordering the tennis courts directly, Bay Villas, Tierra Mar, and Bridge-Way Villas. By early December, more than 1,300 people had signed a petition against it.
- March 2026: Two days of Design Review Board meetings. On March 20, Collier County Planning and Zoning Director Mike Bosi upholds the developer's position on setbacks, parking, and neighborhood fit. Four days later, nearly 100 residents attend a Board of County Commissioners meeting to protest.
- April 2026: Bay Villas prepares a formal appeal to the County Board of Zoning Appeals, the next procedural step after Bosi's interpretation.
- May 2026: Collier County staff confirm to Bay Villas' attorney that the Site Development Plan Amendment has been withdrawn. Naples Grande tables the project, at least for now.
"Whether you're here three months a year, or 12 months a year, it will impact you."
That was Ken Silverman, president of the Pelican Bay Property Owners Association, describing why a project on one resort's property mattered to residents who would never set foot in it. He was right that it mattered. He was also describing a fight that, after five months of organizing, produced exactly zero physical change on the ground. The road past the school and the church carries the same traffic it did before any of this started. The withdrawal is not a rejection. Naples Grande can refile. But as of today, nothing here is different because of it.
The Change Nobody Needed a Hearing For
Compare that process to what happened half a mile away at Waterside Shops, where a chunk of the property's retail identity turned over in the same stretch of months, and none of it required your signature on anything.
The former Nordstrom building sat empty for five years after the store closed in 2020, all 74,591 square feet of it. Collier County issued a construction permit for the site on August 7, 2025, and what's rising there now is RH Naples: six separate galleries connected by landscaped courtyards and glass-roofed walkways, wrapped around a full-service restaurant and wine bar under a glass atrium. The company hasn't confirmed an opening date beyond "late 2026."
That's one project. Here's what else moved:
| Space | Before | 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| Former Nordstrom (74,591 sq ft) | Vacant since 2020 | RH Naples, targeted late 2026 |
| Saks Fifth Avenue store-within-a-store | Dior counter | Standalone 6,000 sq ft Dior boutique, opened June 11 |
| Former Barnes & Noble | Bookstore | Pottery Barn and Williams-Sonoma, two-story outparcel |
| Former White House Black Market | Apparel | Peter Millar sportswear and golf apparel |
| New freestanding pavilion | — | Hermès, back after a nine-year absence |
| 765 Seagate Drive | — | Eddie V's, targeted for this summer |
None of this went before a design review board that residents could show up to. A lease gets signed, a permit gets pulled, a construction crew shows up. The process that took five months and a petition with 1,300 signatures to stop a swimming pool is not the process that turned over six storefronts and added a fine-dining seafood house across the same span of time. One required your attention. The other didn't ask for it.
What it means walking distance from the Pelican Bay Boulevard towers: more dinner options without a longer drive, and more valet traffic on evenings when RH's restaurant, Eddie V's, and the existing Waterside dining lineup are all seating guests at once.
The One You'll Actually Use on a Saturday
Smaller than any of that, and closer to an actual Tuesday: Sunshine Ace Hardware opened at Pelican Bay Marketplace with a two-day grand opening in late January, co-anchoring the center alongside Publix. It's the fourth Sunshine Ace to open in Collier County in three years, part of a hardware chain that's been expanding steadily across the region.
If you've made the drive to the Airport-Pulling Road location for a garden hose fitting on a Sunday afternoon, the difference is not subtle. A hardware store within walking or biking distance of the tram stations turns the Marketplace from a grocery stop into an actual errand hub, the kind of change that never made a headline and never needed to.
The Part of the Neighborhood You Don't See
Two different organizations run the systems that make daily life here work, and it's worth keeping them straight because they handle different things entirely. The Pelican Bay Foundation is the master homeowners association. It manages the beaches, the tram system, member dining at Marker 36 and Sandbar, fitness, and racquets. The Pelican Bay Services Division is a separate Collier County municipal unit responsible for water management, street lighting, beach renourishment, and oversight of the Clam Bay Natural Resource Protection Area.
The tram, run by the Foundation, is the piece of infrastructure doing the most invisible work. Open-air, electric-powered, running along a raised berm through the mangroves to eight stations, Foundation drivers complete more than 900,000 trips to the beach and back every year. That number doesn't move because of a zoning fight or a new furniture store. It just has to keep working, every day, regardless of what else is happening in the neighborhood.
The beach itself got a physical refresh this year, funded by the Services Division rather than the Foundation, since Pelican Bay's beach isn't public. Sand was trucked in from Stewart Mining in Immokalee and spread across roughly 2.9 miles covering both Vanderbilt Beach and Pelican Bay Beach. It's the kind of project that costs real money and shows up under your feet rather than on an agenda you'd think to check.
What This Adds Up To
The fight everyone watched changed nothing you can point to. The changes that will actually shape a weekend here, three new dining concepts at Waterside, a hardware store you can walk to, sand under the boardwalk, arrived through leases, permits, and a services division doing its job quietly. If you're weighing what any of this means for your own building, or just want a neighbor's read on what's actually different, The S Group tracks Pelican Bay closely enough to tell you. Schedule your free consultation.
