Founders Park field upgrades delayed, new turf target shifts to 2027

More than $5 million in Founders Park baseball upgrades are still moving, but slowly, and the new artificial turf field that Islamorada and the Monroe County School District have talked about for years is now aimed at 2027. For Coral Shores High School, that means another season could pass before the promised improvements are ready.

The project has been in motion since around 2023, when school district staff began developing an upgrade plan and set aside about $5 million. Islamorada then approved a new 20-year interlocal agreement with automatic renewal on May 7, 2024, but the separate baseball field license agreement and use agreement that still govern how the field will operate never fully caught up. Those unresolved terms have kept the project in the realm of planning and approvals rather than construction.

By June 24, 2025, the Monroe County School Board had backed a conceptual plan estimated at about $6.1 million. That version included artificial turf, an 800-square-foot two-story press box and concession facility, covered grandstands, new dugouts and a 22-foot adjustment of the backstop and batter boxes to address foul-ball concerns near U.S. 1. Village and school officials also said no trees would be removed.

Even after that, the details kept dragging. The Islamorada Parks and Recreation Citizen Advisory Committee was told on July 10, 2025, that the interlocal agreement required a separate baseball license agreement and use agreement, and those items were still being negotiated. Public information sessions for the Baseball Field Citizens Task Force followed in August and October 2025, showing how much of the work remained in the hands of local government rather than contractors.

The latest approvals have not ended the delay. On Jan. 8, 2026, the Islamorada Village Council unanimously approved a framework agreement for the field upgrades and school-district use of the field. On Jan. 27, 2026, school board members unanimously approved a final design for $5.6 million in improvements that still included artificial turf, a two-story press box and concessions building, restrooms, new dugouts and other work. The village and district still had not settled the new licensing agreement.

That makes the next decisions clear: Islamorada must finalize the license terms, and the school district must decide how long to keep pushing a design before shovels ever hit the ground. Founders Park, a 45-acre centerpiece of the village park system and the home field for Coral Shores baseball, is still waiting for the kind of upgrade that was supposed to arrive long before now.