If you have lived in Highland Beach for any length of time, you already know the strange fact that makes this town different from almost every other beach community in Palm Beach County: you cannot get to the water. Three miles of Atlantic coastline run along State Road A1A, and every foot of it sits behind a private building, a condo association, or a resort gate. There has never been a public beach access point in this town's history.
That is changing, and the reason it is changing right now, in September 2026, is not a ballot measure or a ribbon cutting. It is a permit application the county filed in mid-April, one that quietly started an 18-month construction clock nobody has publicly celebrated yet because nobody is sure it will actually run on schedule this time. This is the story of that clock, and of the two smaller projects on the same stretch of road that are finishing at the same moment.
The Beach No One Living Here Has Ever Reached
Cam D. Milani Park sits on 5.6 acres straddling A1A at the south end of town, and its history is longer than most residents' time in Highland Beach. Palm Beach County bought the land from Lucia Milani in 1987 for $3.9 million, on the condition that it become a public park named for her husband, who had died the year before. What followed was closer to four decades of legal maneuvering than a park project: lawsuits, a 2010 settlement agreement that let the town push construction back to 2020, then 2025, then 2030 if it chose to.
This spring, the county chose not to. In mid-April, Palm Beach County filed permit applications and a compliance package with the town, and if those permits clear, construction could begin as early as this summer. Palm Beach County Parks and Recreation Director Jennifer Cirillo has put the build timeline at about 18 months, which points to a fall 2027 finish for a project whose price tag now runs around $8.6 million, more than double what the county paid for the raw land nearly forty years ago.
| Detail | Figure |
|---|---|
| Site size | 5.6 acres straddling A1A |
| Original 1987 land purchase | $3.9 million |
| Current construction estimate | $8.6 million |
| Phase I parking (town's capital plan) | 38 spaces |
| Compromise figure reported in April 2026 | 46 spaces |
| Permits filed | April 2026 |
| Construction timeline once approved | about 18 months |
| Anticipated completion | fall 2027 |
Notice the parking numbers do not quite agree. The town's own strategic plan puts Phase I at 38 general spaces. The Coastal Star's April reporting described a compromise figure of 46, down from an original plan of 100. That gap is not a typo, it is a reminder that this project has been negotiated down at every stage for three decades, and the number on paper today is not necessarily the number that gets built.
Residents nearby have never pretended to be neutral on any of this. Ron Reame, vice president of the board at the Boca Highland Beach Club & Marina next door, has said for years that a beach entrance so close to the exposed, hazardous Yamato Rock formation simply does not make sense at high tide.
"We're not really in favor of anything on the beach. It just doesn't make sense."
Whether that argument slows anything down again is an open question. What is not in question is that the design the county has settled on, an elevated boardwalk, a lifeguard and restroom building, and a guarded parking entrance, is built specifically to avoid the kind of beach most people picture when they hear the word park.
Built Around a Nesting Season, Not Despite It
Here is the fact that reframes everything else about this project: Highland Beach's own municipal website states that this town records more annual sea turtle nests than Boca Raton and Delray Beach combined. That is not a marketing line, it is posted on the town's official Sea Turtle Program page as a plain statement of fact, and it explains why a five-acre park has taken this long to design.
Nesting season here runs March 1 through October 31, which means as you read this in September, nests up and down this stretch are still hatching. Milani Park's boardwalk is being routed over native vegetation that the design team is leaving undisturbed rather than clearing, and the county's own materials describe the finished site as closer to a nature preserve than a conventional beach park, with interpretive signage planned for both the habitat and the property's history, which is believed to include a Native American burial ground.
That same turtle-first posture shows up in town policy well beyond this one park. Highland Beach has its own Sea Turtle Lighting Ordinance, and residents with questions about it can reach Town Planner Ingrid Allen directly. Any new fixture along this beach, whether it is a streetlight, a building sconce, or a park lamp, gets evaluated against the same standard: does it point hatchlings toward the ocean or away from it. A town this small does not usually have the leverage to slow a county park project for years over parking counts and lighting angles. This one has, and the turtle numbers are a big part of why.
The Road Is Done. The Crosswalks Are the Postscript.
Long before Milani Park breaks ground, most residents already lived through the town's other big infrastructure story: the $8.3 million FDOT project to mill, resurface, and widen A1A, adding five-foot bike lanes in each direction and reworking swales for drainage. As of this year, that project is what Town Manager Marshall Labadie has called "substantially complete," with the orange barrels gone and, in his words, only "a lot of mini-projects here and there during the daytime" left to finish, as reported by Boca Daily News.
One piece of that project is still an open irritation for anyone driving over the bridge at Linton Boulevard. The stormwater work required removing the electrical loop that used to trigger the traffic signal on demand, so for now the light runs on a fixed county timer rather than responding to actual traffic, and backups have been worse than usual with seasonal visitors on the road.
The genuinely new piece of news, one that only surfaced in the last month, is the town's plan to fix the project's last unresolved complaint: pedestrian crossings. Highland Beach has approved a $375,000 state-funded project to embed LED lighting directly into the roadway at eight mid-block crosswalks along A1A, paired with milling and regrading of the shared-use path to correct flooding the original FDOT project inadvertently created by changing the road's elevation. The town signed a $283,920 contract with Lux Solar Inc. for the fixtures, which will use the same push-button activation already in place and are required to be finished within six months of the formal notice to proceed, according to Boca Daily News's reporting on the project.
What This Adds Up To
Put the three pieces next to each other and the timing stops looking like coincidence and starts looking like a town finishing one long project in stages. The road residents drove past every day for over a year is done. The crosswalks that make that road safe to cross on foot are the next item on the list. And the park that will, for the first time in this town's recorded history, give a resident a legal way to walk from a parking spot to the sand without a building key fob, has a permit filed and a rough date on the calendar.
- A1A repaving: substantially complete, minor punch-list items remaining
- Crosswalk LED lighting: approved, contracted, under a six-month build clock
- Milani Park: permits filed, construction possible this year, targeted completion fall 2027
None of this changes the daily rhythm of Highland Beach overnight. The beach most residents use will still be the one attached to their building for a while longer. But the shape of the next two years here is more legible now than it has been in decades, and if you own property along this stretch of A1A, or you are watching from a distance and wondering what any of it means for the block you already call home, that is exactly the kind of conversation Scott Correale has with Highland Beach owners on a regular basis. If it would help to talk through it, you can schedule a private consultation anytime.
