Three City Votes Later, Lowdermilk Park Still Looks the Same

Walk into Lowdermilk Park this month and the first thing you'll notice isn't a construction fence. It's the gate arms. The City of Naples has activated new arms at the park's entrance and exit, green when the park is open, red when it closes, with a sensor that lifts the bar as you drive out. It's a small thing, but it's the only thing at Lowdermilk that has actually changed on the ground this year. Everything else you may have read about, the new playground, the long-delayed gazebo, a chunk of tourist tax money, is still sitting in a council packet somewhere. For Coquina Sands residents who treat this beach as an extension of the backyard, that distinction matters more than any of the dollar figures attached to it.

The Vote That Covered Four Parks, Not One

Most of the coverage of Naples playgrounds this year has actually been about Cambier Park, not Lowdermilk. Cambier has history on its side. It opened in 1948 as Candy Cane City, the city's first real public playground, and it stayed a fixture through decades of birthday parties and downtown events until it was abruptly closed on October 29 when inspectors found its wooden structures rotting past safety standards. That closure, and the fight over what replaces it, has understandably eaten most of the oxygen.

But the April 21, 2026 vote by the city's Community Services Advisory Board wasn't only about Cambier. It covered four parks at once: Cambier, Charlie C. Anthony, River Park, and Lowdermilk. Two design firms competed for the work. Playcore Wisconsin pitched a set with oversized ant sculptures and a canoe on springs meant to simulate a river trip, playful enough that it won a unanimous vote for second place. Playmore West Inc., based in nearby Fort Myers, won the top recommendation for a design built around a tinted rubber accessibility path, a treehouse entrance, and a slide with a side exit so a child who needs help isn't struck by the next rider coming down. The vote wasn't unanimous. Board members Christina Muracco and Brian Smith dissented. For Cambier specifically, Playmore's own construction timetable pointed to an April 2027 completion, assuming City Council backed the board's pick at its first May meeting.

None of that timetable was ever attached to Lowdermilk. The April vote settled who would build the new playgrounds, not when Lowdermilk's would go in the ground. That distinction got lost in the coverage, and it's worth separating out if you're trying to figure out whether your own neighborhood park is about to close.

The Contract That Is Actually About Lowdermilk

The vote that actually concerns Lowdermilk came two months later. In June 2026, the Naples City Council took up a $699,787 agreement with Playmore West Inc. specifically for Lowdermilk's own project: a new playground on the park's north side, where the previous structure was destroyed by Hurricane Ian in 2022, and a covered gazebo that had been part of a 2025 improvement plan until construction bids came in over budget and the gazebo got cut.

The funding for that contract is stitched together from three sources. Some of it comes from money already set aside in two earlier park enhancement projects. Some of it comes from a $250,000 gift from the Nommensen family. The rest, another $250,000, would come from an amendment to the city's 2025-26 budget, pulled from the Beach Fund. That's not a small ask for a single playground and gazebo, but it also isn't unusual for beachfront capital work in Naples, where construction costs and bid overruns have already derailed one version of this same gazebo once.

What that money actually buys, once it clears and a contractor schedules the work, is straightforward: a rebuilt north playground on ground that's been empty since 2022, and a gazebo that Naples families have effectively been waiting on since last year's budget cycle. What it does not buy, at least not yet, is a start date. As of this writing there's no announced closure for Lowdermilk's playground or gazebo area, which is a meaningfully different position than Cambier, which has already been shut for the better part of a year.

A Different Kind of Money Entirely

There's a third figure floating around that gets folded into the same conversation, and it shouldn't be. In August 2026, the Collier County Tourist Development Council approved a Category A tourist development tax grant to the City of Naples worth up to $750,000 for fiscal year 2026-27. That money is for beach maintenance across the full nine miles of Naples beach and its roughly 40 public accesses, for Lowdermilk Park operations specifically, and for replacing kayak and canoe racks. It's operating money, drawn from hotel and short-term rental taxes and justified to the council on the basis that it promotes tourism, not a capital construction budget for a new playground.

If you rent a kayak or canoe at Lowdermilk during peak season, this is the pot of money most likely to touch your actual visit, through better-maintained racks and general upkeep, not through anything you'd see as a construction project. It runs on its own fiscal year and its own logic, separate from the one-time $699,787 playground contract and separate again from the vendor selection that also touched Cambier, Charlie C. Anthony, and River Park.

Here's how the three actually break down against each other:

Three separate actions, three separate purposes, and only one of them, the June contract, has anything to do with what the park physically looks like.

What to Actually Expect This Season

If you're planning a fall or winter afternoon at Lowdermilk, the park you'll walk into is the same one that's been there for years: two gazebos, one near the volleyball courts and one closer to the entrance, both still available to reserve through the city, a duck pond with its walking paths, sand volleyball courts, and the existing playground, not yet demolished, not yet fenced off. The only operational change is the gate arms at the entrance and exit, which residents with beach parking permits will notice on the next visit whether they're looking for it or not.

Cambier Park offers the closest real preview of what a Lowdermilk closure might eventually look like, since it's already been shut since late October and is tracking toward an April 2027 reopening under the same vendor. If Lowdermilk's own timeline follows a similar arc once its funding clears and a contractor is scheduled, a closure landing sometime after this winter's high season, rather than during it, would track with how the city has handled its other beach parks. But that's an inference from Cambier's pattern, not an announced date for Lowdermilk. Nothing published so far commits the city to a specific groundbreaking.

For now, the practical read for Coquina Sands residents is simple. The paperwork is real and the money is largely secured. The construction isn't here yet. If you've been holding off on booking a gazebo for a family gathering because you'd heard the park was about to get torn up, you don't need to wait. Book it. The gate arms are the only thing that's changed so far, and everything else is still a line item working its way through the next city budget cycle.

If you're weighing a move into Coquina Sands and want a clearer read on how neighborhood amenities like this one factor into value and lifestyle fit, Teresa Krapf and the Krapf Group can walk you through what's actually settled versus what's still in process, here and in the neighborhoods around it.