"Where do we park?"
That was the question boardwalk business owner Emre Uralli asked at a packed Indialantic Town Council meeting in October 2024, and it's the same question worth asking about the vision boards currently making the rounds at Town Hall. The town's first attempt at redesigning its boardwalk got voted down that night. What you're looking at now, the paver plazas, the turtle-friendly walkway, the community center with a nod to the old Nance Park casino, is round two.
If you walk this boardwalk on any given morning, past Bizzarro's for a slice or into Surfinista for an acai bowl, you've probably seen the renderings taped up or heard neighbors debating them. Here's what's actually in the plan, what got the last version killed, and why the word "concept" is doing more work in this document than it looks like at first glance.
What's pinned to the boards this time
In December, the planning firm Land Design presented a new round of vision boards at a public open house. The town's own project page is careful to frame these as a starting point, not a final design, and that distinction matters more than it sounds like it should.
Here's what's on the table. A boardwalk would run the full length of Wavecrest Avenue, built around the existing sea grapes rather than through them, to protect the dune system. It would be raised on posts so nesting sea turtles can still move underneath it, a detail the town says came out of consultation with the Sea Turtle Preservation Society, and any construction would still need sign-off from the Florida Department of Environmental Protection before it moves forward.
The stretch in front of Bizzarro's and Surfinista would get repaved in pavers, with a small plaza and public seating on the Nance Park side. Removable bollards would let the town close that section to cars for farmers-market-style events. According to the town's own notes, both business owners liked this part of the concept a lot. The rest of Wavecrest's parking areas would get pavers too, mainly to help stormwater drain through instead of running off.
There's a plaza planned for the end of 5th Avenue where it meets the boardwalk, plus similar entrances where the side streets off A1A reach the beach. Two sport courts show up in the plan with no fixed use yet. The town's language leaves it open: volleyball, basketball, pickleball, tennis, to be decided later. And the current bathroom building at Nance Park would be replaced by a small community center with rentable event space, still including public restrooms for beachgoers. If it happens, the town says it wants to work with an architect to echo the old casino that once stood on that same patch of park.
Bioswales, rain gardens, and native plantings round out the plan, mostly aimed at handling stormwater better than the current pavement does.
It reads like a finished vision. It isn't one.
The sentence that matters more than the drawings
Buried in the town's own project page is this line: a funding source has not been identified.
That's not a footnote. It's the whole story. Every rendering on those boards, the plaza, the sport courts, the community center, exists because a design firm was paid to imagine it, not because the town has a plan to pay for building it. The page itself says as much: these are concepts that set a vision for possible future projects, not construction drawings, and nothing changes unless the council and residents choose to move forward and find the money to do it.
For a resident, that distinction is the difference between a plan you should expect to see under construction next year and one that could sit exactly where it is now for another two or three council cycles.
Why the first version didn't survive
To understand how much weight that funding gap carries, it helps to know what happened the first time the town tried this.
Back in October 2024, Mayor Mark McDermott brought international planners in to present redesign ideas for the boardwalk, which he described at the time as old and rundown. The reasoning included safety, after reports of drunk drivers damaging the boardwalk in years past. The mayor's vision, in his own words, was a nature feel, a gathering space where people could exercise, eat, or relax.
Residents at that meeting weren't sold. A few of the concerns that surfaced:
- Parking. Uralli, who owns a business on the boardwalk, wanted to know where customers and residents would park if the footprint changed.
- Money. Former mayor Dave Berkman told the council directly that he didn't think they were being good stewards of the town's money. Councilmember Carrie Foy, who sits on the budget and finance committee, said flatly that the town didn't have the funds for the project as proposed.
- Process. Foy also pushed back on the framing of the plan itself, arguing that a boardwalk meant to be open to residents should be shaped by what residents actually wanted, not handed to them as a finished concept.
The vote that night sent the town back to the drawing board. The planning firm that presented those first designs was never hired. Residents asked for more public workshops and more transparency about where any money would come from before another round of designs got presented.
What actually changed between then and now
The town didn't drop the project. It restarted the process. In the spring of 2025, Indialantic put out a formal request for proposals for design services covering boardwalk and pedestrian improvements, with responses due by mid-April. That RFP is what eventually brought Land Design into the picture.
By September 2025, Mayor McDermott told the council he felt an earlier project meeting had gone well and expected the design firm to return with plan options that fall. That set up the December open house where the current vision boards were unveiled.
One other data point worth knowing if you live nearby: at the council's December 10, 2025 meeting, members approved parking agreements with both Bizzarro's Famous New York Pizza and Indialantic Acai LLC, the business behind Café Surfinista. Those two agreements aren't the boardwalk redesign itself, but they show the same two businesses whose storefronts sit at the center of the plaza concept are already working with the town on parking logistics in the meantime, regardless of whether the larger project ever gets funded.
What to actually watch for
If you're not planning to attend every council meeting, here's the practical version. The town posts its meeting minutes and agenda packets in its online document library, and the mayor's office sends out a Friday Memo most weeks covering whatever staff and council are working on, from stormwater pipe repairs to playground grants. Neither of those is boardwalk-specific reading, but both are where any funding decision, if one comes, will surface first.
Until that happens, the honest way to think about the boards on display is as a wish list the town has now workshopped twice, not a construction schedule. The plaza in front of Bizzarro's, the raised turtle-friendly walkway, the community center honoring the old casino, all of it depends on the town solving the exact problem that sank the first attempt: finding money nobody has committed to yet.
For now, the boardwalk you walk today, five blocks long, metered parking at the north end, benches, showers, and the same short stretch of sand that's kept people coming back for decades, is still the one that exists. What's on the boards is a possibility the town is still trying to afford.
If you're weighing what any of this might mean for property along Wavecrest or elsewhere in Indialantic, whether it's worth factoring into a purchase or a sale, William Taylor Real Estate has been working this stretch of the Space Coast long enough to separate a funded project from a concept board. Let's Connect if you'd like to talk through what's actually on the table.
