As reported by The Naples Press: "Whether you're here three months a year, or 12 months a year, it will impact you."
Ken Silverman said that in the middle of the fight, not at the end of it. He was president of the Pelican Bay Property Owners Association, standing in front of a room of Park Shore, Seagate, and Pelican Bay neighbors trying to explain why a hotel's pool renovation had turned into the most closely watched land-use dispute in Naples. If you walk or drive past the corner of Seagate Drive and Crayton Road today, the seven tennis courts he was talking about are still there. So is the question of what happens to them.
Most of what got written about this fight ends the same way: the developer withdrew its application in May, the neighbors won, move on. That is the version circulating on porches and in condo elevators along Gulf Shore Boulevard. It is also not quite what happened. The county did not side with the neighborhoods here. It sided with the resort. And the pause came after the zoning interpretation and amid a costly appeal.
The county ruled against the neighbors, not for them
In November 2025, the owners of Naples Grande Beach Resort submitted pre-application plans to Collier County to convert seven of its east-side Har-Tru tennis courts into what the site plan called Clam Pass Cove: a lazy river, two 22-foot slides, a children's pool with roughly 19 water features, and a food-and-beverage cafe with its own kitchen. The resort's design firm, Cooper Carry Inc., drew it up on 3.3 acres, and the resort's ownership group, South Street Partners of North Carolina alongside the British equity firm Henderson Park, called it an amenity upgrade.
Neighbors in Seagate, Naples Cay, and the Pelican Bay communities closest to the courts, Bay Villas, Tierra Mar, and Bridge-Way Villas, called it something else. A petition against the project topped 1,300 signatures. Bay Villas hired lawyers and argued the plan violated the Pelican Bay Planned Unit Development and the county's land development code on setbacks, open space, and compatibility with a residential zone.
On March 20, 2026, Collier County's Zoning Division answered. It rejected the neighbors' arguments. The official interpretation found the setbacks and parking sufficient and sided with the resort's reading of its own PUD. Four days later, close to 100 residents showed up at the Collier County Board of County Commissioners meeting to object. They were not allowed to speak. Chairman Dan Kowal cited chamber rules and the possibility the matter would return as a future agenda item, and declined to open public comment.
That is the part of the story that tends to get skipped when people say the neighborhood won. The one formal decision on the merits, the March 20 interpretation, went against them.
How the May pause unfolded
Bay Villas appealed anyway. By that point the community had spent roughly $100,000 in legal and professional fees and raised close to $40,000 through a GoFundMe campaign just to keep the appeal alive. Patrick Wack, president of the Seagate Property Owners Association, put the stakes in blunter terms than most official statements allow.
Gulfshore Business quoted Patrick Wack: "I call it an amusement park."
The appeal never reached a public vote. On May 30, 2026, Collier County staff told the attorney representing Bay Villas that Naples Grande had withdrawn its Site Development Plan Amendment. Naples Grande is tabling the water park for now, in the county's language, not abandoning it.
Withdrawing an application is not the same event as losing one. A denial is a decision on the record, something a board votes on and something that creates a result the applicant has to live with. A withdrawal simply takes the filing off the table. Nothing in the public record from this spring says Naples Grande was told no. What the record shows is a roughly $140,000 legal fight, a zoning ruling that favored the resort, and an application withdrawn before a commission hearing that had not yet taken public comment on the matter. Tom Polke, president of the Pelican Bay Foundation, had said months earlier that the board hoped to find something workable for both sides. The May withdrawal reads less like a resolution and more like a pause.
The slide that's already there, and the one that isn't
Part of what makes this confusing for anyone hearing about it secondhand is that Naples Grande already operates a water feature. The resort sells day passes to a beachside pool complex with a family pool, a roughly 100-foot slide for kids over 42 inches tall, an adults-only pool with a hot tub, and the Oasis Pool Bar. Guests headed to the beach walk the same shared boardwalk and trolley route that connects the resort to Clam Pass Park, and the resort's own restaurant, Rhode's End, sits along that route.
None of that is what the fight was about. Clam Pass Cove was a different scale entirely: two slides at 22 feet instead of one at ground level, a lazy river current ride, a standalone kitchen, and a footprint more than three acres larger than anything currently on the property. If you have heard a neighbor mention the Naples Grande water park and pictured the existing pool deck by the beach, you are picturing the wrong thing. The proposal was for a public-facing attraction built where the tennis courts sit now, not an expansion of the amenity that already exists.
Seven courts out of fifteen
The tennis complex at Naples Grande runs to 15 Har-Tru courts, five with lights, managed under Peter Burwash International. Only the seven on the east side, the ones closest to Bay Villas across Crayton Road, were ever part of the proposal. The other eight were never in question. That distinction matters if you are trying to picture what changes and what doesn't: this was never a plan to close the tennis operation, just to demolish a little under half of it and replace that footprint with the water feature.
As of today, the demolition permit the resort filed in January has not proceeded. The courts are still standing, and by most accounts still in regular morning use, which means the daily rhythm along that stretch of Seagate Drive has not visibly changed since the fight began ten months ago.
What this looks like on your walk today
If your route along Gulf Shore Boulevard or the Clam Pass boardwalk takes you past the resort this fall, you will see the same seven courts, the same pro shop, the same trolley run to the beach that existed before any of this started. What you will not see is a resolution. No demolition equipment, no building permit posted, no formal denial in the county record. Just an application that was pulled back in May and a set of owners on both sides who spent real money getting to that point.
Groups like the Gulf Shore Association of Condominiums and the City of Naples itself wrote to county commissioners this year urging them to reject the plan outright, on the record, so this could not simply resurface next season. That formal rejection never happened. What happened instead was quieter and less permanent. Nothing filed since May suggests Naples Grande has closed the door on Clam Pass Cove. It just isn't walking through it right now.
That is worth knowing if you live along this corridor and assumed the story was finished. It isn't finished. It went quiet, which in a land-use fight is not always the same thing as over.
Karen Van Arsdale has spent decades tracking how the smaller shifts along Naples' beachfront corridors, a paused permit, a reworked site plan, a neighborhood association's letter to the county, tend to surface again long after the headlines move on. If you want a straight read on what's actually pending near your stretch of Gulf Shore Boulevard, or anywhere else along the Moorings and Park Shore line, reach out to Karen Van Arsdale to schedule a private consultation.
This article is general information, not legal, tax or financial advice. Consult a qualified professional about your situation.
