DiamondHead Beach Resort will not go before the Fort Myers Beach Town Council this month to pitch their planned 55-room expansion. They have asked the town to push their plan to February 2027. They had planned to go before the council on Monday.
It’s been a winding road for the DiamondHead team. Back in October the Town Council kicked their revised proposal back to the LPA but the procedure to do that wasn’t correctly followed. A majority of the 5 sitting council members was needed to send the project back. The final vote was 2-1 with John King dissenting (The Mayor and Vice Mayor recused themselves).
Obviously a new council will be sitting in February and they can take another vote to kick it back to the LPA. The current council believed that the new DiamondHead proposal was a “significant departure” from the original plan which was unanimously denied by the LPA. They wanted the LPA to see a full presentation and vote on the newer plan. The new council can also decide to hear the proposal in February and not kick it back to the LPA.
DiamondHead currently has 121 rooms. They want to go to 178 total by asking the town to approve an additional 24 units, above the 154 they say they were granted by Lee County when the County was still doing the permitting.
The proposed expansion has been fought hard by owners at Surf Song, which is a condo building right next door. The revised design had the previously proposed beachfront units on the east side of the property relocated to the west side. There was zero support for building a nw structure on the beach. The DiamondHead team was hopeful the changes would satisfy the owners of Surf Song but they came out against the revised plan as well. They also hired a land use attorney and requested intervener status which, if the council moved forward, would most likely grant that attorney 30 minutes to fight the project.
DiamondHead General Manager Neil Hopgood has said the resort needs the additional rooms to stay competitive and relevant. He also said he’s ready to build today. Several projects have been approved by the town, some of them years ago, yet most of them are not coming out of the ground for various reasons.
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