As Naples Press reported, Patrick Wack said on March 24, standing outside a Collier County Commissioners meeting attended by nearly 100 of his neighbors: "We have the will, the time and the resources to continue this battle." He was talking about Clam Pass Cove, the 3.3-acre pool and slide complex Naples Grande Beach Resort wants to build across Crayton Road from Bay Villas, the Pelican Bay neighborhood that borders the hotel's south side.
Six months later, if you ask around the south end of Pelican Bay what happened to that fight, you will get two different answers. One camp says it is dead, because the hotel pulled its site plan back in May. The other says it is still barreling toward some future hearing, because that is how it got described in a neighborhood roundup as recently as August. Both are half right, which is a more useful thing to know than either version alone.
What The March Ruling Actually Said
The dispute started as a question of interpretation, not design. Naples Grande's owners, a joint venture between South Street Partners and the British firm Henderson Park that bought the resort in 2024, wanted to replace existing tennis courts with a pool complex featuring water slides estimated at 21 to 25 feet tall, a splash pool, a lazy river, ground-level speakers, and a café. The hotel called it a customary amenity. Neighbors called it a water park, which matters under Pelican Bay's Planned Unit Development rules because customary hotel amenities don't require the same review that a standalone attraction would.
On March 20, Collier County Planning and Zoning Director Mike Bosi issued an official interpretation upholding the hotel's position on setbacks, parking, and environmental fit. Bay Villas board president Andy Dimitrou told reporters an appeal was already being drafted. By the time residents packed the March 24 commissioners meeting, Bay Villas said it had already spent about $100,000 in legal and professional fees, and the broader coalition opposing the project reported nearly 5,000 signatures and close to $150,000 raised.
That meeting also cleared up something the process itself had been muddying. Commissioner Chris Hall told the room that when the appeal eventually reached the board, it would arrive not as a vote on whether to approve or reject the water park, but as the Board of Zoning Appeals ruling on whether Bosi's interpretation of the rules was correct. It is a distinction that sounds procedural until you realize it means no single hearing was ever going to settle the question outright.
The Pelican Bay Foundation Joins The Appeal
The bigger shift came a few weeks later, and it came from an entity that hadn't been a party to the fight until then. On April 17, the Pelican Bay Foundation, the master homeowners' association for the entire community, filed its own administrative appeal challenging the county's interpretation. The Foundation's position was direct: allowing a 3.3-acre pool complex to proceed without a full Planned Unit Development amendment misclassifies what the project actually is. Bay Villas Association filed its own set of appeals around the same time.
Two organizations, running two related but separate legal challenges, both aimed at the same March 20 ruling. As of that April filing, neither had a scheduled hearing date, and it wasn't yet clear whether the Hearing Examiner or the Board of Zoning Appeals would take the case first, or whether both bodies would eventually weigh in.
What Changed In May
Here is the part that hasn't made it into most recent updates on the neighborhood. On May 30, Collier County staff confirmed to the attorney representing Bay Villas that Naples Grande had withdrawn its Site Development Plan Amendment, the specific filing that would have let the physical construction move forward. County staff had already issued a site plan comments letter pushing back hard on the hotel's setbacks, parking projections, and noise mitigation before the withdrawal happened.
The county's framing of the pause is worth sitting with. Pulling the site plan lets the resort proceed with a hotel room remodel and other upgrades without having those separate projects tangled up in an active site plan fight. It doesn't resolve anything. The zoning interpretation appeals filed by Bay Villas and the Pelican Bay Foundation keep moving on their own track, and the hotel can refile the site plan once those appeals are decided, in whichever direction they land.
That is two different clocks running at two different speeds. One stopped in May. The other never did.
Why It Still Looks Unresolved
If you've read a neighborhood update since summer that described this as a fight still headed toward its next public hearing, you weren't reading anything inaccurate exactly, you were reading something that hadn't caught up to the May filing. The Naples Press piece on this dispute carries a headline from mid-August calling the proposal "rebuffed" but still "afloat," language that fits the spring timeline better than it fits what actually happened two months earlier.
The practical version for anyone living south of the North Tram station: there is no water park hearing on the county's calendar right now, because there is no active site plan for anyone to hear. What is still active, and what won't show up on a calendar until the Hearing Examiner or Board of Zoning Appeals schedules it, is the underlying question both the Pelican Bay Foundation and Bay Villas raised in April, whether this kind of project can be approved as a customary amenity or has to go through the full PUD amendment process. Until that gets decided, Naples Grande has a reason to wait before refiling anything.
What Actually Changed On The Ground This Year
Set against six months of appeals and interpretations, the changes you can actually walk to feel almost modest. Sandbar, the casual beachfront spot at Pelican Bay's South Beach, reopened this year with a renovated dining room, sliding glass doors that open straight onto the sand, and a menu that shifted toward a Mediterranean register, house-made pomodoro sauce and Greek-style lamb burgers among the additions. It used to be the lunch stop you defaulted to between Marker 36 dinners. That gap has narrowed enough that it now works as a full evening out.
Sunshine Ace Hardware held its grand opening on January 24 and 25, co-anchoring Pelican Bay Marketplace alongside Publix. It sounds like a small addition until you've spent a Saturday morning driving to Airport-Pulling Road for a lanai screen roller or a specific gauge of stainless screw. That errand now takes fifteen minutes instead of an hour, which is the kind of change that never shows up in a headline but reshapes an actual week.
Both of those are done. Nobody is appealing a hardware store. The water park question, by contrast, is paused in exactly one of its two parts, and the part still running doesn't have a date on it yet.
If you're trying to keep track of where the Clam Pass Cove appeals stand once a hearing date does get set, or what any eventual ruling might mean for the south end of the neighborhood, the Peter T. Rose Team follows Pelican Bay closely enough to notice when the story moves. Reach out anytime you want the current read.
This article is general information, not legal, tax or financial advice. Consult a qualified professional about your situation.