Extra Innings: Founders Park's Long-Awaited Summer Reset
For most of the past two years, the park closest to Plantation Key Colony has felt like a house mid-renovation. The pool was fenced off. The baseball field sat under a cloud of legal back-and-forth between the village and the school district. Even the dog run was in the middle of an identity change. If you live on this stretch of Plantation Key and drive past Founders Park on your way to the grocery store or the post office, you've watched all three of those storylines drag on without much resolution.
This summer, they all closed out within weeks of each other.
The Ron Levy Aquatic Center inside Founders Park is the only Olympic-size pool this far south in the continental United States, a 50-meter by 25-yard tank with a diving well and four springboards that hosts everything from lap swimmers to the Coral Shores High School swim team. It closed on February 1, 2026 for what the village called resurfacing and major facility improvements: new pool interior surfacing, tiling, deck repairs, upgraded lighting and mechanical systems, and a rebuilt lifeguard first aid office.
It did not reopen until June 18. That's four and a half months without the pool, a stretch that ate through pickleball season overlap, the spring school swim schedule, and the start of what would normally be Islamorada's early summer swim rush. Backed in part by a $436,000 grant from the Monroe County Tourist Development Council, the finished project ran just over $3 million, a number that reflects how much work was actually behind those construction fences: new locker rooms, a rebuilt scoreboard, and improved access to the high-dive platform, on top of the pool surface itself. Village officials, county representatives, and members of the Islamorada Chamber of Commerce turned out for the reopening, and the Synchro Sirens synchronized swim team closed the ceremony with a performance in the water.
If you'd stopped checking on the pool sometime in March, assuming it would be back by spring, you missed most of that timeline.
The bigger story, and the one that ran longer, involved the baseball field that anchors the same park. Coral Shores High School has played its home games at Founders Park under an agreement with the village that dates back to 2001. That original pact allowed the team access on weekdays from 2:30 p.m. until the end of a game, but any other use, including weekend Little League, required 30 days' notice and village approval. During a 2025 public meeting on the project, one former school board member said his own family was driving to Key Largo six days a week just so his kids could play Little League, because Founders Park's field wasn't available to them under the existing terms.
The push to fix that started building steam in October 2025, when the school board approved a preliminary concept for a rebuilt field, artificial turf, new dugouts, and a two-story building behind home plate for a press box, concessions, and restrooms. Price tags floated as high as $6.1 million. Then came the hard part: writing a license agreement both sides could live with. That process stretched from January into July.
"I think this is a good deal for everybody. I think we can invest in that property knowing that we have 20 years there."
That's school board member Woltanski, speaking after the deal finally closed, as reported by Keys Weekly. Here's how the seven months actually played out:
The two boards marked the moment by exchanging signed baseballs, which is either a nice touch or a small monument to how long this took, depending on how many of those January meetings you sat through. Construction on the new turf field is slated to wrap before the 2027 season opens.
Founders Park's one-acre dog run got its own quieter update. The space has synthetic turf, ADA-accessible walkways, separate large- and small-dog areas, splash stations, and agility equipment, the kind of build-out that makes it a genuine daily stop rather than an afterthought fenced lot. In the spring of 2025, the village asked residents to help name the dog park in honor of Mike Forester, known locally as Mangrove Mike, a former Islamorada councilman and mayor who opened Mangrove Mike's Café in 1998 and ran it as a gathering spot for locals until his death from COVID-19. He served on the boards of several nonprofits, reopened his café to feed first responders for free after Hurricane Irma, and made annual trips to Uganda from 2016 through 2018 to support children in orphanages there. The park's own description of the space now reads as a tribute to him, down to the note about the two dogs, Henry and Ms. Joy, that he left behind.
It's a small thing next to a $3 million pool and a $3.8 million ballfield, but it's the kind of detail that tells you something about how this village handles its own history: it puts names on things.
A few minutes up Overseas Highway from Plantation Key Colony sits the site of a very different kind of negotiation. In the spring of 2022, residents spent weeks working out noise ordinance conditions with the owners of Islamorada Beer Company, who had just won village approval to open Crooked Palm Distillery, a brewery, distillery, and tasting room, at the former BB&T bank building at 90184 Overseas Highway, directly in front of the neighborhood. The vote passed 4-1, with one council member pushing to table the item until a formal noise ordinance was in place first.
Islamorada Brewery & Distillery has operated in the village since December 2017, and the brand has since grown into a small regional operation with taprooms in Islamorada, Fort Pierce, and Tavernier, pouring house spirits like a Dark Barrel Aged Rum and a Hibiscus Gin alongside its craft beer lineup. The tasting room that emerged from that 2022 zoning fight is the kind of walkable neighborhood stop that didn't exist here a decade ago.
If you live in Plantation Key Colony, the practical version of all this is simple. The Ron Levy Aquatic Center is open again, at its normal $5 adult and $3 youth pool fee, for the first time since the February closure. The Founders Park baseball field's future is locked in through at least 2046 rather than being renegotiated every offseason, so Coral Shores baseball, and eventually the youth programs that share the complex, aren't going anywhere. The dog park is worth a visit if you haven't been since the upgrades. Plantation Key Fitness classes, the seasonal outdoor program at the park, are on their usual summer break and pick back up in the fall. And the brewery corner up the highway is still there for the end of a long week.
None of this required a single new building permit near your own street. It just meant that the park you already drive past, the one that anchors the daily rhythm of this stretch of Plantation Key, finally worked through the backlog that had been sitting on it since before most of this year's calendar was printed.
If you're weighing what life actually looks like on this part of Plantation Key, from the park routine to the water access that defines the neighborhood itself, Alina Davis has spent close to two decades learning these corners of the Upper Keys block by block. Let's Connect.
Whether you're searching for your perfect Keys escape, investing in a vacation rental, or selling a slice of paradise you've loved for years, my goal is always the same: honest guidance, strong advocacy, and a seamless experience from start to finish. The Florida Keys isn't just real estate — it's a lifestyle, and I'm here to help you find your place in it. I would be honored to help you take that next step toward sun, water, and everything the Keys has to offer.
