Cape Coral Old Golf Course Park: Where the Plan Stands

Back in April, the City of Cape Coral told a packed council chamber that the final concept for the old golf course would come back in the fall. It is now the middle of September. Fall is here. And the honest status of the biggest piece of undeveloped land inside this city is that the plan is still waiting on water.

I follow this project more closely than a bounce house company probably should. Some of that is habit. I spent 20-plus years in the Air Force and a second career as a CFO, and a 175-acre public project with an unresolved drainage problem and no identified construction money is exactly the kind of thing I used to read staff reports about on a Sunday night. Some of it is practical. If Cape Coral builds an event lawn and an amphitheater on that parcel, it changes where families in this city hold things.

So here is where it actually stands, with the numbers, and what it does and does not mean for anyone planning a backyard party between now and whenever a shovel goes in the ground.

The parcel, and what is on the table

The site is 4003 Palm Tree Blvd. The City bought the 175 acres in August 2024. The course had sat unused since 2006, which is most of two decades of a blighted hole in the middle of an otherwise built-out city.

At the second public meeting on April 8 at City Hall, Rachel Cotter, a landscape architect with Weston & Sampson, presented two concept plans. She described the property as roughly the land equivalent of 130 football fields, and noted it runs more than a mile from tip to tip — far enough that walking distance and ability level had to be designed for rather than assumed.

Concept A, Anchor. Everything organized around one central core of activity: a combined community and nature center, a small amphitheater (size not yet determined), event space, an open lawn for unprogrammed play, a centralized parking area, playgrounds, and comfort stations with shade, restrooms and potable water. Roughly five miles of multiuse paths.

Concept B, Drift. The same program elements dotted across the site instead of stacked in one place, reached by light-touch roads with few vehicular access points. Drift adds a golf experience and a dog park to the community center, nature center, play area and gathering space. Also about five miles of trails.

Both were built from seven guiding principles the design team laid out: safe public access, flood relief, water quality, constructed ecology, thoughtful land use, consideration of existing wildlife, and development standards built around ten percent impervious surface.

That last one is the number I would circle. Ten percent of 175 acres is 17.5 acres. Every road, every parking stall, every building pad, every hard court on the entire property has to fit inside that. It is a serious constraint, and it is the reason both concepts lean so heavily on trails and open lawn rather than structures.

Why the concepts are on hold

The design is parked while Kimley Horn finishes a stormwater analysis. Kellie Clark, a professional engineer with the firm, walked the room through what that involves: data collection on existing conditions and the surrounding neighborhood, a model built from it, and simulations of where rain goes and what could be changed to improve flood conditions.

The storms they modeled are the part worth knowing. They ran an actual event — Hurricane Debby in 2024, for which they had rainfall data and photographs. The figures presented were about 5.71 inches of rain and a peak tide of 2.47 feet. They also ran a 5-year storm and a 100-year storm. Next comes an alternatives analysis of three different stormwater scenarios, compared on cost against benefit gained.

The practical implication was stated plainly at the meeting: the recreation layout has been pushed back so the stormwater data can inform it. The city may need more water storage on the site than the concepts currently assume.

Not everyone in the room was comfortable with that. Richard Kampf, who lives near the course, told the Breeze afterward that he worried the stormwater requirement would leave little room for the amenities residents have been shown, and that when he asked how construction would be funded, he was told future council members would decide. He credited the parks department for including residents in the design process. He was less sure the amenities would ever get built.

Reading the sequence

I do not think the delay is the bad news here. Designing the park first and solving the drainage second would have been the actual mistake, and this city has enough experience with water arriving where nobody planned for it. Engineering before layout is the correct order.

The open question is the one Kampf raised, and it is a budgeting question, not a design question. A master plan is a document. It is not an appropriation. The concepts were funded for fiscal year 2026; construction was not. Which means the realistic reading of “final concept this fall” is that a council will receive a plan, not that anyone is mobilizing equipment. Phased public parks of this size in Florida typically move in fundable increments over years, and the first increment is usually the unglamorous one — drainage, access, utilities.

If you want to follow it, the city keeps a project page with the timeline, the April 8 presentation deck and the October 2025 stormwater report posted.

The wildlife already living there

One detail from the city project page that I think gets underweighted: protected species surveys were done in 2024 and early 2025, and habitat for burrowing owls, gopher tortoises and Florida bonneted bats has been identified and marked on site. No relocations are planned. Invasive tree and shrub removal began in May 2025, targeting 85 to 95 percent of the trees on the property that were identified as invasive.

That is a meaningful amount of the tree canopy coming out on purpose, and it is why shade structures show up in both concepts. It also explains why residents at Banyan Trace, which backs up to the course, raised noise and wildlife concerns about an amphitheater pointed toward their neighborhood. Those are not unreasonable objections to a design that is still in draft.

What an event lawn would, and would not, change

Here is the part that is directly my business, and I would rather say it now than have someone find out the hard way in 2030.

Both concepts include event and gathering space. Anchor includes an amphitheater. If either gets built, Cape Coral gains a large purpose-built outdoor venue inside the city limits, which it does not currently have. That is a real gain for community events.

But it would be a city park. And the Cape Coral Parks and Recreation Department's published park rules state that inflatable bounce houses are not permitted in any park — no exceptions, no permit path, in the same list that restricts alcohol and skateboarding outside Eagle Skate Park. A beautiful new event lawn at 4003 Palm Tree Blvd would, under the rules as written today, be a place you cannot set up a bounce house. We wrote up how that rule works and what people do instead earlier this year.

I am not arguing the rule is wrong. Parks departments have real liability and turf reasons for it. I am saying that if the city is about to design dedicated event space for the first time in a generation, the design phase is when someone should ask whether a designated, staked-down, permitted inflatable area belongs in that program. Once a master plan is adopted, that conversation gets much harder.

Meanwhile, for the next few years

Nothing about this changes where Cape Coral parties happen between now and then. They happen where they have always happened here: backyards, driveways, church and school lots, and HOA common areas. That is what we set up on every weekend, and the constraints are the ones we always talk about — how the lot drains after a wet week, where the service drop runs, whether there are 15 feet of clearance from the seawall.

The old golf course is worth watching because it is the one genuinely new thing on this city's recreation map. Just do not plan a 2027 birthday around it.

If you live in the Palm Tree Blvd corridor and want to know whether your own yard drains well enough to hold a unit after a wet September week, call me at (239) 212-0011. That is a five-minute conversation, not a sales call.

Sources

• City of Cape Coral, Old Golf Course Transformation project page — timeline, April 8 presentation, stormwater report, wildlife and invasive removal notes.
• Cape Coral Breeze, April 9, 2026, Floodwater challenges and tentative park plans — concept details, storm modeling figures, resident comment.
• WINK News, April 8, 2026, Cape Coral residents weigh in on 2 park concepts for old course — neighborhood reaction.

---

← Back to Blog Browse Rentals