Milani Park Is Finally Breaking Ground. Here's What Actually Changes on Your Stretch of A1A
August 20, 2026
August 20, 2026
If you've walked or driven past the fenced lot just north of Spanish River Boulevard for any length of time, you already know the routine: nothing happens, and it hasn't happened for so long that the emptiness itself became part of the scenery. That's about to change. Palm Beach County filed permit applications and a compliance package with the Town of Highland Beach in mid-April 2026, and county officials told The Coastal Star that construction could begin as early as June, with an 18-month build pointing toward completion in fall 2027.
For a town that measures itself in a single mile of A1A, this is not background noise. It's the first physical movement on a fight that has run since 1987, and the version of the park that's actually going into the ground this year is smaller, quieter, and more contested than the 40-year headline suggests.
Nobody in Highland Beach has ever really argued against green space. The argument has always been about what comes with it, specifically, how many cars a public beach access point invites onto a two-lane road that already carries seasonal traffic between Boca Raton and Delray Beach. The 2010 settlement agreement between the county and the town locked in a number: 100 parking spaces on the west side of A1A, non-negotiable, tied to a legal document neither side could unilaterally rewrite.
That's the number residents have been dreading for fifteen years. It is not the number breaking ground this summer.
A few quick facts, gathered from the county's and town's own records:
In September 2025, County Commissioner Marci Woodward and County Administrator Joe Abruzzo sat down with Highland Beach Mayor Natasha Moore and Town Manager Marshall Labadie and did something the 2010 agreement never anticipated: they negotiated the number down. The full 100 spaces required on the west side got split into two phases, with the second phase left open-ended.
The town's own 2025-2026 Strategic Priorities Plan puts the first phase at 38 general parking spaces. The Coastal Star's reporting on both the October 2025 agreement and the April 2026 permit filing describes the same phase as 46, with the remaining 54 spaces held for a second phase the county hasn't scheduled. The two numbers don't match exactly, which is itself worth noting. Even the people closest to this project are still working out precisely how small "smaller" turns out to be.
What's consistent across every source is the shape of the compromise: whatever opens this year or next is well under half of what the settlement legally allows, and there's no fixed date for the rest.
The stranger turn in this story is who's been asking for less. The Milani family sold this land on the condition that it become a park. For decades, they were the ones pushing the county to finally build it. Then, in 2025, that reversed. Cam Milani II wrote to county officials asking them to abandon the project or, failing that, cut the parking dramatically, down to as few as 25 spaces. His mother, Lucia Milani, who lives near the site, testified at a public hearing that she'd come around to the residents' side after years of hearing their concerns directly.
Woodward, for her part, framed the eventual compromise not as a concession but as the point of the whole exercise. As she put it to The Coastal Star, the goal was
a collaborative agreement to bring the most palatable option for a small, peaceful park in a small, peaceful town.
Whether 38 spaces or 46 counts as "small" depends on where you're standing on A1A when the first cars start pulling in.
Part of what's driving the design isn't politics at all. It's the beach itself. Ron Reame, vice president of the board of the adjacent Boca Highland Beach Club & Marina, has pointed out that the sand here narrows sharply at high tide and includes the Yamato Rock formation, a feature that can disappear underwater and catch people off guard who don't already know it's there.
That's part of why the current design routes a boardwalk over native vegetation the county says has been left to grow undisturbed, rather than simply clearing a straight shot to the water. The boardwalk itself is getting more design attention than a standard county park would usually justify. Palm Beach County's Art in Public Places program commissioned railing and seating panels built into Accoya wood decking, with imagery meant to reflect the site's coastal ecology and its layered history, including the fact that the land is believed to have once been a Native American burial ground. The permit package the county filed in April also covers a lifeguard station, restroom facilities, a gatehouse for a parking attendant on the west side, and the water and sewer connections needed to support all of it, each one a condition written into the original 2010 settlement's list of 43 requirements the county has to satisfy before it can build anything at all.
If the June start held, machinery has likely already replaced the fencing on that empty lot by the time you're reading this. If it slipped, as these timelines have a well-documented habit of doing, expect movement before the year is out regardless. Either way, the practical shift for anyone living along this stretch, including Regency Highland residents along S Ocean Blvd, is less about a grand new amenity opening overnight and more about a slow-motion construction zone settling into a road you use every day. Expect equipment staging, intermittent lane management on A1A, and the kind of dust and noise that comes with 18 months of utility work before any of it resembles a park.
What you won't get, at least not in this first phase, is anything close to the 100-space lot residents spent a decade fighting. The park that's actually arriving is the one that survived a public hearing where even the family that started the fight asked for less of it.
For four decades, the story of this parcel was that nothing would ever get built. The real story turning out to be true in 2026 is closer to the opposite: something is finally getting built, and it's smaller than almost anyone arguing about it expected.
If you're weighing what a shift like this means for property near the south end of Highland Beach, or you're simply trying to understand how a project like Milani Park fits into the town's longer-term character, the team at Your Luxury Listing Group tracks these local details as closely as the listings themselves. Request a Private Consultation to talk through what's changing on your stretch of A1A and what it means for you.
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