Seven months after submitting permits to rebuild the Fort Myers Beach Pier and federal agencies still haven’t signed off, still, Lee County swears progress is happening, somewhere behind the red tape.
Lee County leaders say design plans for the pier replacement are now more than 60% complete and the design phase is moving toward 90%.
While some consider it a significant stride ahead, many visitors and residents say it’s still not fast enough. The iconic pier has been boarded up and broken since Hurricane Ian tore it apart in September 2022.
For nine-year-old Hayden Hunt, visiting from Maine with his family, discovering the pier was still gone came as a big and disappointing surprise.
"We walk over. I see the pier's destroyed, and we brought over fishing rods and all of our fishing bits and then we look at that and we see the whole entire piers broken!" said Hunt.
According to county officials, the new pier will be 1,000 feet long and 12 feet wide, nearly 71% longer and 50% wider than the original. It’s being designed to meet today’s modern building standards and environmental requirements while still honoring the look and feel of the original structure.
"I think it's going to make the businesses a lot more money," said Sandy McQuestion, a seasonal resident of Fort Myers Beach. "The bigger this is, the more people are going to be on the pier. They walk the pier, the by the time they get back, they will be even hungrier. They're going to sit down and they're going to have something to eat!"
But even with the design moving forward, construction isn’t expected to begin until late 2026, and it will take about a year to complete. Before any work can begin, the project must clear federal permitting with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
The county says permits to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Florida Department of Environmental Protection were submitted in late September 2024. Approval times are based on the workload of the reviewing agencies and the commenting agencies that they coordinate with to process the permit.
The rebuild is being funded through FEMA’s Disaster Relief Fund, with construction alone estimated to cost around $11.5 million.