A 200-acre property in Fort Pierce, Florida was supposed to hold a Wavegarden Cove at the center of a $595 million planned community called Koa Bay. The surf park is now off. The land is the subject of a rezoning application meant to make way for an AI data center. When it came before the city's Planning Board on 17 September, the crowd was large enough that the meeting paused over fire regulations, and before it reconvened the applicant's attorney asked for the item to be tabled until a future, unspecified date, Hometown News reported. As of 11 October 2026, it is not on the board's 12 October agenda, which lists a site plan and a sign-code amendment.
The reason is the ordinary one: the money never came together. Koa Bay's owner, Chad LaBonte of Devcon Enterprises, has said the developers were unable to raise enough capital to build the surf park, IRC Media reported, and Lee Dobbins, the attorney for landowner Willow Lakes LLC, said in WPTV's report that the plans fell through after the property owner could not raise sufficient capital. Construction never began.
What Koa Bay was going to be
Fort Pierce's planning staff describe the vision, first approved by the City Commission in October 2020, as a "village" built around a "state-of-the-art and largest world-class surf park in the country." The plan called for around 1,000 residences, retail and office space, two hotels, and surfside bungalows, all arranged around a Wavegarden Cove. Florida has no Cove open today, and the only other one planned in the state, at Jacksonville, has not broken ground either.
Two sets of power lines cross the property through easements, which complicated the layout of a residential community. That detail matters for what happened next.
What is proposed instead
Willow Lakes LLC, which owns the roughly 200 acres at 10050 West Midway Road and Interstate 95, filed a rezoning application in June. It asks the city to put about 174 acres into light industrial use for the data center, and the remaining 26 acres along Midway Road into general commercial, which the application describes as intended for retail and "could include a hotel, gas station and/or restaurants/fast food." The application proposes a restrictive covenant limiting the light industrial land to data center use. TCPalm refers to the data center as Project Neptune.
The pitch turns the site's problem into its selling point. WPTV reported that Dobbins cited the Florida Power & Light transmission lines already on the site and a man-made lake that could be used for a closed-loop cooling system. The application also points to a major electrical substation just south of the property. The power lines that complicated the housing are now part of the case for the data center.
Approval is not a formality. Fort Pierce City Commissioner Michael Broderick said the proposal could be an appropriate use of the land, but he has conditions, WPTV reported. "Data centers are kind of the rage right now," he said, and he wants developers to demonstrate there will be no impact to groundwater, no impacts to user fees from power consumption and no noise pollution. "If they don't, then I will not be supportive of it." Parker Whiteside, who lives about a mile and a half from the property, put it more briefly: "I hate that idea."
Fort Pierce community activist Kevin Keene has asked the city commission to have an ordinance drafted requiring a unanimous vote of the five-member commission to approve any future "high-impact data center development," Hometown News reported. He has also challenged the city to produce records on the project's expected demand for utilities, wastewater, back-up generators, fire and emergency response, and roads. If the rezoning is approved, the applicant intends to bring in a partner company to develop the data center, according to the application, and that company would still need the city to approve a site plan.
The tabling followed a related item on the same agenda. The city's planning director, Kevin Freeman, said Fort Pierce has no zoning classification that specifically addresses data centers, Hometown News reported, and the Planning Board declined to vote on a staff recommendation to designate a zoning category for them, according to TCPalm. "There's no point in going forward with that if the City Commission hasn't made a decision on what's allowed," Dobbins told TCPalm after the meeting. "This is the first step in the process."
If you paid Koa Bay money
Membership payments and prepaid wave pool sessions are being refunded, The Inertia reported. The developers have also indicated they are searching for another location in St. Lucie County for the surf concept, according to IRC Media.
That is a narrower statement than it first reads. The surf park at this site is finished either way: if the rezoning is denied, the developers could still build the residential property, just without the pool, The Inertia reported.
Good to Know
This is the third US project we have covered since late August to lose its site, its developer, or its approvals. Gilbert, Arizona's Cactus Surf Park lost its third developer in seven years without ever breaking ground, and Newport Beach reversed its own approval of a project the council had already cleared.
None of the three failed on the wave. Cactus went through three developers, starting with one that could not secure financing. Koa Bay could not raise the capital. Newport's approval was repealed after a referendum petition. In all three, the hard parts were capital and local government.
This is also a reminder of what pipeline counts do and do not tell you. We track 100 surf parks worldwide: 52 open, 47 in development and one temporarily closed. The development number only ever counts projects that are still alive. Koa Bay never entered it, and projects that die tend to leave the tally without an announcement, which makes the pipeline look steadier than it is.
Florida has five surf parks left in the pipeline and one open, and the open one is a standing wave near Tampa rather than a lagoon you paddle into. The nearest to the Koa Bay site is The Point Surf Park in Fellsmere, just miles to the north, which is under construction with an Endless Surf lagoon and is the furthest along of the five. The others are Jacksonville Surf Park, Orlando Surf Park in Horizon West, Peak Surf Park near Tampa, and Shell Point Beach & Surf Club in Panama City Beach.
For the full picture of what is actually being built and where, see our surf parks under construction tracker and the Florida guide.
