If you drive Ocean Boulevard through Highland Beach these days, the road itself feels like a different street. The lanes are wider. There are bike lanes now, painted in bright green, running the length of town. The potholes and patchwork asphalt that defined A1A for the better part of two years are gone.
Town Manager Marshall Labadie told Boca Daily News in January that the $8.3 million FDOT resurfacing project was "substantially complete," with only minor punch-list items left. For most residents, that was the headline they'd been waiting on since barrels and detour signs first went up in 2024.
But "substantially complete" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Two pieces of the corridor that matter more to daily life than smooth pavement, the traffic signal at Linton Boulevard and the ability to cross A1A on foot without stepping into traffic, are not finished. One is barely started. The other only got funded this past August.
What the Finished Project Actually Covered
The scope of the completed work was specific: milling and resurfacing the existing roadway, widening it in both directions to add five-foot bicycle lanes, modifying swales for drainage, and upgrading signage and pavement markings. That's the part that's done, and it's the part most visible from behind the wheel.
What it didn't touch was the traffic signal at A1A and Linton, where mistimed lights have caused backups, especially as seasonal visitors return to town. Labadie explained why to Boca Daily News: the electrical loop that used to detect waiting cars and trigger the light was removed during separate stormwater work in Delray Beach, and the signal now runs on a fixed county timer instead of responding to actual traffic.
State Rep. Peggy Gossett-Seidman has asked the legislature to fund a fix, but as Labadie put it, "if it doesn't go anywhere with the state, we will proceed to see if we can have those budgeted this year." Translation: the light stays unreliable until either Tallahassee or the town's own budget catches up.
Why There's a Second Project At All
Here's the part that connects the dots most residents haven't had reason to make. The resurfacing project raised the road's elevation. That changed the grade relationship between A1A and the adjacent shared-use path, and it's caused flooding on the path itself, in some spots bad enough to force pedestrians into the travel lane.
That's not a hypothetical concern. It's the stated reason for a brand-new $375,000 state-funded project, approved by town commissioners just this past August, to install in-ground LED lighting at all eight of Highland Beach's mid-block crosswalks and to regrade the sections of path where water now pools. The town awarded a $283,920 contract to Lux Solar Inc. for the lighting devices. The lights will be bi-directional, flashing yellow, and activated by the same pedestrian push buttons already installed at some intersections.
So the road project that just wrapped is, in a real sense, the reason the next project exists. Here's where things actually stand as of this month:
| A1A Project Piece | Status | What's Left |
|---|---|---|
| Road milling, widening, bike lanes | Substantially complete since January 2026 | Only minor punch-list items |
| Traffic signal timing at Linton | Still broken | Runs on a fixed timer; loop detector removed during unrelated stormwater work |
| Mid-block crosswalk LED lighting | Just started | $283,920 contract with Lux Solar Inc., approved August 2026 |
| Shared-use path flooding | Just started | Same contract regrades sections where the raised roadbed now causes standing water |
None of this is disaster news. It's the ordinary friction of a multi-agency road project where FDOT, the county, and the town are each responsible for a different slice of the same half mile. But if you've been telling yourself the construction era on A1A is over, it's more accurate to say the visible half is over and the half that actually determines whether it's safe to walk to dinner is just getting underway.
The Other Construction Nobody's Talking About
While the road story has been playing out in full public view, a much older fight has quietly turned a corner just a few blocks south.
Cam D. Milani bought roughly five acres at the south end of Highland Beach about fifty years ago, intending to build multi-family units there. The Town Commission fought him, litigation dragged on for years, and a settlement eventually allowed 65 units that were never built. When Milani died, his widow Lucia sold the land to Palm Beach County in 1987 for $3.9 million, on the condition it become a park bearing her husband's name. The town fought that too. A 2010 settlement agreement gave the county until at least 2020 to build it, with options to push construction back to 2025 or 2030.
That delay clock has finally run out. Palm Beach County filed permit applications for Cam D. Milani Park in mid-April 2026, and county Parks and Recreation Director Jennifer Cirillo told The Coastal Star at the time that construction could begin as early as June and take about 18 months, putting completion around fall 2027. That June start came and went without a groundbreaking. What's actually on the calendar now is a county solicitation for a construction manager, which lists a start this month, September 2026, and completion by September 2027. Cost estimates vary by document too, from a preliminary $7 million in that solicitation to $8.6 million in the reporting from this spring. Whichever numbers hold, the shovels are no longer hypothetical.
What's actually getting built on the 5.29-acre parcel:
- A guardhouse with a controlled gate at the parking entrance
- An elevated boardwalk designed not to disturb the protective dune
- A restroom and lifeguard building
- Mobi-Mats extending from the boardwalk to the sand for easier beach access
- Phased parking that's shrunk considerably from what was originally negotiated. The town's own capital plan lists 38 general spaces for Phase I; county reporting from late April cited 46. Either figure is a fraction of the 100 spaces once attached to the settlement.
The site includes Yamato Rock, a limestone outcropping just offshore that's long been a local snorkeling spot, home to fire coral, angelfish, and damselfish, and popular with anglers who fish it for snook, tarpon, and jacks. The rock's name traces back to the Yamato Colony, a group of Japanese pineapple farmers who worked the area in the early 20th century. County planner Bryan Davis has called the site significant precisely because so little else from that era survives, telling The Coastal Star it's "the only parcel left that's still identifiable" with the colony.
There's a simpler way to state why this matters beyond the history: right now, there is no public access to the ocean anywhere within Highland Beach's town limits. Every beach in town is private. When Milani Park opens, it will be the first place in Highland Beach where anyone, resident or visitor, can legally walk onto the sand without a private key or a condo fob.
What This Means If You Live Here This Fall
Expect two kinds of activity on the same stretch of A1A this season, and don't confuse them. Construction staging and permitting work near the Milani parcel doesn't mean a finished park is close. Flaggers and lane work tied to the crosswalk lighting contract don't mean the road project itself has restarted. They're separate timelines that happen to share a zip code.
If the Linton light is still catching you off guard at the end of a long line of cars, that's the loop detector issue, not something the new pedestrian project touches directly. And if you notice new embedded lights glowing at a crosswalk before winter, that's the $375,000 project doing exactly what it was funded to do.
None of this changes the fact that Highland Beach in early fall still feels like a town catching its breath after two years of orange cones. The town's Homecoming event on Thursday, October 23, from 5 to 8 p.m. at St. Lucy Catholic Church, is a good marker of that shift. There's a new lineup of food trucks this year, trolley transportation will run guests in since no public parking is permitted at the venue, and it's as good a night as any to see how much of the corridor's noise has actually quieted down.
Highland Beach doesn't change quickly, and when it does, it tends to happen in decades rather than seasons. This fall, for once, more than one of those long-running stories is moving at the same time.
If you're watching this corridor from your own lanai and wondering what any of it means for a property you own or one you're thinking about, BlackLabel Luxury Real Estate has been tracking Highland Beach closely for exactly this kind of question. Let's connect.