Naples Grande's Water Park Is Shelved. The Zoning Question Behind It Isn't.

Walk the boardwalk that connects the Naples Grande parking lot to Clam Pass Park on any weekday morning and you will pass seven tennis courts on your right, red clay, a little worn at the baselines, usually occupied by a drill session before the heat sets in. For about six months, those courts were the most closely watched three acres of ground on the Park Shore border. Not because of tennis. Because the resort that owns them wanted to turn them into a water park, and by the time the fight was over, it had pulled in four homeowner associations, a GoFundMe campaign, two Collier County commissioners, and a legal bill that ran past six figures.

The park did not get built. If you have been half following the story through Park Shore Association emails or a neighbor's recap at Venetian Village, you probably already know that much. What the ending does not tell you is why the same fight could happen again, on the same parcel, without anyone having to change a single line of code.

What Naples Grande actually proposed

The resort's ownership group, South Street Partners with British equity firm Henderson Park, filed pre-application plans with Collier County's Growth Management and Community Development Department to convert seven of its east side tennis courts into what the design firm Cooper Carry called an amenity and what nearly everyone else called Clam Pass Cove Waterpark. The plan covered roughly 3.3 acres and included a forest-fringed lazy river, two turbo-style water slides, a children's pool with close to twenty water-toy features, and a food-and-beverage building with its own kitchen next door.

The slide height mattered more than it sounds like it should. Collier County treats anything over 25 feet as a separate structure requiring its own approval process, so the plans were revised down to 22 feet, a number that shows up in nearly every account of the project specifically because it was designed to stay just under a regulatory line. The design also moved the tallest slides away from Crayton Road and toward Seagate Drive, and pushed the nearest building in Bay Villas, the homeowner association directly across the street, out to roughly 350 feet from the water feature.

None of that softened the reaction. Bay Villas sits close enough that residents could hear a cafe's cooking odors and a lazy river's ground-level speakers from their own patios, and Seagate Drive already carries traffic for a school, a church, and the main public parking lot for Clam Pass Park. Adding a public day-pass attraction to that stretch of road was, for a lot of people, the actual problem, more than any single number on a site plan.

A dispute wider than one property line

Naples Grande sits inside Pelican Bay, but the opposition never stayed inside Pelican Bay's boundary. Seagate and Naples Cay, both immediately adjacent, joined early. So did the Gulf Shore Association of Condominiums. Park Shore's own Association flagged the project to its members directly, noting that while the site is technically in Pelican Bay, it sits close enough to the Park Shore border that traffic, parking pressure, and stormwater changes could reach homes on this side of the line too.

Ken Silverman, president of the Pelican Bay Property Owners Association, put the stakes in plain terms at one of the early information sessions:

"Whether you're here three months a year, or 12 months a year, it will impact you."

The bigger argument, the one that pulled in associations with no direct sightline to the tennis courts, was about precedent. If a resort inside a residential planned unit development could add public slides, speakers, and a commercial kitchen and have county planners call it an accessory improvement, every other commercial parcel inside that same PUD, including the Ritz-Carlton and the Inn on Pelican Bay, could point to the same interpretation later. Silverman framed it that way to a reporter covering the fight, and residents who had never set foot on a tennis court in their lives showed up to commission meetings because of that logic, not because of lazy rivers.

The fight nobody got to finish saying out loud

Bay Villas retained counsel and asked Collier County's Growth Management Community Development Department for official interpretations on several zoning terms central to the project, mainly whether the addition counted as a customary hotel amenity or a stand-alone commercial use, and whether non-overnight guests could legally use it as a public attraction. On March 20, 2026, the county's Zoning Division sided with Naples Grande, rejecting the residents' arguments about setbacks and compatibility.

Four days later, opponents tried to bring their case to the Collier County Board of County Commissioners. Roughly 100 residents from Pelican Bay, Seagate, and Park Shore showed up. Commission Chairman Dan Kowal declined to open the floor for public comment, citing chamber rules and the possibility the item could return as a future agenda matter. Patrick Wack, founding member of the No Waterpark Coalition and president of the Seagate Property Owners Association, said the group would appeal the zoning ruling. By that point the coalition had collected nearly 5,000 signatures on a petition that had started at just over 1,300 signatures three months earlier. Bay Villas had already spent roughly $100,000 on legal and professional fees and raised close to $40,000 through a GoFundMe campaign to keep the appeal funded, including single contributions of $7,000 from the Seagate Property Owners Association and $5,000 from the Pelican Bay Property Owners Association at one meeting alone.

Then, on May 30, 2026, Collier County staff advised Bay Villas' attorney that Naples Grande had withdrawn its Site Development Plan Amendment. The Park Shore Association's own recap called it one of the most closely watched land-use disputes in Naples, and described the county's language plainly: the resort is "tabling the water park for now."

What "tabled" does not mean

Here is the detail that gets lost in every recap that ends at the withdrawal: the zoning interpretation that started this whole appeal, the one that sided with Naples Grande on setbacks and on the accessory-use question, was never overturned. Nobody won that argument. The developer simply chose not to keep pressing an application it was legally entitled to pursue, at least for now.

That distinction matters for anyone who lives near a commercial parcel inside a residential PUD in this part of Naples, not because another water park is imminent, but because the interpretation itself is still sitting on the county's books. If Naples Grande revisits the idea in a future season, or if another commercial neighbor along Seagate Drive or Crayton Road decides to test the same accessory-use logic, the precedent question Silverman raised in that first meeting is still unresolved. The courts are still there. The zoning answer that let the project get as far as it did has not changed.

What stays the same, for now

For anyone walking the Clam Pass boardwalk this season, the practical picture has not changed. The trolley still runs the three-quarter-mile stretch through the mangroves. Rhode's End still serves lunch through mid-afternoon at the beach end. The seven courts are still red clay, still busy most mornings, and Seagate Drive still carries the same mix of school traffic, churchgoers, and beachgoers it always has.

A few things are worth watching if you live in this corridor:

• Whether Naples Grande refiles a revised Site Development Plan Amendment, which would restart the same interpretation fight from a stronger procedural footing for the county's prior ruling
• Whether the appeal Wack described ever formally reaches the Board of Zoning Appeals, since that venue, not a standard commission meeting, is where the setback and accessory-use questions would actually get decided
• Whether other commercial parcels inside Pelican Bay's boundary reference the March 2026 interpretation in their own future applications

None of that changes what makes this stretch of coastline worth living on. It does mean the quiet version of Seagate Drive that residents fought to keep is resting on a withdrawal, not a ruling.

If you are weighing a move to Park Shore, or already call it home and want a clearer read on how neighborhood governance and county land use actually work here, Donna Schrim has spent more than 26 years watching how these decisions play out on the ground in Naples. Let's Connect.