In March, Estero Council approved four recreational proposals for a 20-acre village-owned property on Williams Road. Dozens of residents attended a public meeting Thursday night to be updated on the progress of negotiations with High 5 Entertainment, Crystal Lagoons, Chicken N Pickle and Pickle & Social.
Newly elected Mayor Jon McLain started off the night by referencing a survey the village did several years ago identifying what residents would like to see in their community in terms of opportunities to recreate. From there, the village’s first steps were to acquire the land and then seek unsolicited offers for private-public partnership.
“Now you might say, why don’t we just do it ourselves,” McLain said. “One reason is in order to really make a first-class facility, that’s going to take a lot of capital. This would be an opportunity for us to get first-class facilities, built with developer’s money, we’ll partner with them with the lands that we already own and get set up for long-term benefits on the income they receive.”
Considering the small staff size of the village, council reached out to a local company that had expertise and experience in public-private partnerships.
Michael Comparato, CEO of Bonita Springs-based Vieste program management firm, has been working alongside the village throughout negotiations.
“The village tasked us with helping to find ways that we can enhance the multigenerational programming and create some additional revenue streams into the village,” he said.
As the village moves forward, it will have to narrow down a choice between the two pickleball oriented concepts.
Comparato said the pickleball entertainment concepts proposed for the village should not be compared to what the city of Naples has or what is offered to Estero residents in their own gated communities.
Based on recent communication with developers, the anticipation is that there will be 24 indoor and outdoor courts, with a covering over each court for sunlight and heat protection.
Another aspect that comes into play is the Golf Coast Driving Range and how that facility will tie into the proposals.
Comparato said some will work better than others, such as with High 5 Entertainment, which has already expressed a desire to include the driving range as a complimentary operation to its plan.
Others similar to Crystal Lagoons would lack symmetry with the driving range but would still offer a unique concept for the village.
“The other thing that’s interesting about [Crystal Lagoons] is the ability to put a High 5 Entertainment or a Pickle & Social on the beach, where even those venues now can offer a beach access and have their restaurants have an outdoor seating area literally on the water,” Comparato said.
Chicken N Pickle would also not be the best fit for the driving range. However, Pickle & Social does have a virtual golf component that may be able to incorporate the driving range into its concept.
“High 5 is really the only one that already has a high-end outdoor miniature golf component,” Comparato said. “Just on the surface, it appears like the most likely private partner to absorb the driving range piece, if that’s where we went, would probably be High 5.”
Staff considered the primary ingress and egress point on this 20-acre site, concluding that the access point would best be via Coconut Road, not Williams Road.
For the driving range, that means if the facility does move forward as part of a proposal, the orientation will move from south to north to north to south.
As council seeks a substantial amount of public participation and involvement, focus groups for residents interested in being involved are beginning to form. The first focus group started last week with a focus on pickleball.
“The reason we wanted to have this broader information session is to attract a larger number of folks and get the message out farther,” Comparato said. “Hopefully all these folks will convey the message even broader than that, and we’ve asked them to sign up for additional focus groups. Some groups may be more interested in how we program the driving range, or how we might approach High 5 entertainment to access bowling alleys or their miniature golf, that kind of thing.”
From there, residents will be broken up into areas they have a passion for or a primary interest in. “As we go back to these potential partners and we start talking about programming, for example. Now, rather than us trying to guess what the committee might want, we’ll have feedback directly from those focus groups as to what they’d like to see.”
The village will continue to negotiate agreements with interested parties, with hopes that a narrower focus on proposals will be reached by the end of April.
