Why the Milani Family Tried to Stop the Park Built in Their Name

"To date, we have resisted those pleas. Today that changes."

That line comes from a May 2025 letter to Palm Beach County commissioners, written by Cam Milani II. He was asking the county to abandon a park that carries his late father's name, on land his family sold specifically so that park could be built. The reversal landed in the middle of a fight that had already run for four decades, and it explains something residents driving past the empty lot on South Ocean Boulevard have never quite understood: the argument over Milani Park was never really about whether Highland Beach wanted a park. It was about how many cars would be allowed to park there, and by 2025 the family that gave the land its name was asking the county to bring that number down.

Construction is now scheduled to start this month. The county's own solicitation for a construction manager lists a September 2026 start date and a September 2027 completion, a schedule that finally puts a real timeline on a project the Milani family began negotiating with the county back in 1987.

The Only Public Beach This Town Has Ever Had

Highland Beach is a town of roughly 4,300 residents squeezed onto a barrier island between Boca Raton and Delray Beach, and it has, functionally, no commercial center. According to the town's official history of the site, Cam D. Milani bought just over five acres here in the 1970s intending to build 130 multi-family units. The Town Commission fought him on it, litigation dragged on for years, and the deal that eventually stuck let Lucia Milani sell the parcel to Palm Beach County in 1987 for $3.9 million, on the condition that the county build a public park named for her husband, who had died the year before.

That condition is the reason Highland Beach is on the verge of having something it has never had: a legal, public way to walk onto its own beach. Every other stretch of shoreline in town sits behind private condominiums and homes. The town's entire commercial footprint amounts to two businesses sharing one building, one of them the Delray Sands Resort. There is no boardwalk, no public parking lot, no marked crossing where a resident who doesn't own beachfront property can legally reach the sand. Milani Park changes that on a single 5.29-acre parcel straddling State Road A1A.

What The County Is Actually Building

The scope, according to Palm Beach County's active construction manager solicitation, includes a guard house, an elevated boardwalk, and a combined restroom and lifeguard building, along with landscaping on both sides of A1A. The boardwalk railings and seat tops, built from Accoya wood, will carry commissioned artwork inspired by the site's coastal ecology and cultural history, a detail the county's Art in Public Places program put out to bid with a budget of $57,550.

Parking is where the real fight lived, and the numbers tell the story better than any summary of the meetings. The county's original site plan called for 100 spaces west of A1A, a figure required under the 2010 stipulated settlement agreement between the town and the county. Highland Beach residents packed public meetings for years arguing that number down. Some pushed for 40 to 42 spaces. The Milani family itself asked for a maximum of 25. What the county and town actually agreed to last fall was a phased compromise: 46 spaces now, split into 38 general spots, four for people with disabilities, and four for staff, with the remaining 54 spaces pushed into an undefined second phase. Add the two phases together and you land back at the 100 the settlement required all along. Nobody actually got the number reduced. They got the timeline stretched.

County Commissioner Marci Woodward, whose district includes Highland Beach, described the compromise this way after it was reached:

"It is a collaborative agreement to bring the most palatable option for a small, peaceful park in a small, peaceful town."

The Milani Family Changes Its Position

The Milanis had spent years pressuring the county to finally build the park their patriarch's death made possible. Then, in the spring of 2025, that pressure ran in reverse. Cam Milani II wrote to commissioners asking the county to abandon the project outright, or at minimum cut the parking dramatically. Lucia Milani, who still lives near the site, testified in person that watching her neighbors' frustration had changed her mind. Asked why, she pointed to years of hearing from residents who live closest to the parcel:

"They have convinced me that maybe this is not such a good idea after all."

Woodward's response made clear the county wasn't going to reopen the settlement on the family's request either. There were, in her words, no plans to cut parking further than the compromise already in place. Construction is proceeding on the schedule the county set.

What's Actually Under the Sand

Part of why this parcel drew a public art commission instead of a plain parking lot is what's already there. According to the county's own call to artists, the site includes indigenous Native American burial grounds established more than 1,000 years ago, and in the early 1900s it was settled by Japanese immigrant farmers known as the Yamato Colony. A coral outcropping just offshore, still known locally as Yamato Rock, served as a gathering spot for fishing, picnics, and celebrations during the colony's peak in the 1920s. The artist selected for the boardwalk railings is being asked to draw directly on that history, meaning the park opening in 2027 will carry a documented layer of local history that residents currently drive past without any marker or signage explaining it.

What Changes On A1A This Year

For the next twelve months, the practical reality for anyone who lives on or drives South Ocean Boulevard near the south end of town is a construction zone. The county's schedule has crews on site from this month through next September, working on both the parking lot west of A1A and the beach access improvements to the east. The guard house and lifeguard building suggest the county intends to staff the entrance once it opens, which will make this the first spot in Highland Beach where a stranger can legally park a car and walk to the water without trespassing on private property.

The second phase of parking, the 54 spaces that would complete the full 100 required under the 2010 settlement, still has no construction date attached to it. That decision sits with the county, not the town, and nothing in the current solicitation documents commits to a timeline for it. Residents who assume the park opens with its full parking capacity in 2027 should expect otherwise. What breaks ground this month is Phase I only.

The Guaranteed Maximum Price for the project has not yet been finalized, and the artist commission for the boardwalk railings was only awarded earlier this year. Both of those numbers will firm up well before the September 2027 target, and either could shift the final math on what residents actually get for the money the county has budgeted.

If you're weighing what a changing shoreline means for a property you already own here, or you're trying to understand how a project like this factors into value on this stretch of A1A, Michelle Sadownick offers a private consultation to walk through it with you.