Pompano Beach Is Building Two Downtowns at Once, Three Miles Apart

Jump to a section

• Project one: the new downtown and the Innovation District
• The financing fight, explained properly
• What is actually built downtown, and how far behind
• The controversy: E. Pat Larkins and the Northwest
• About that commuter rail
• Project two: The Pomp
• The controversy: what The Pomp is built on
• The controversy: Costco and the neighbors
• Why anyone in Broward should care
• What to watch
• Quick Reference
• Frequently Asked Questions
• If you only have an hour

Two of the largest redevelopment projects in Broward County are happening in the same city at the same time, about three miles apart.

One is a new downtown, built on land the City of Pompano Beach and its Community Redevelopment Agency spent three decades quietly buying up, parcel by parcel, between Dixie Highway and I-95. The other is The Pomp, a 223-acre private redevelopment of the old Pompano Park harness track, anchored by a casino and a planned Cordish Live! entertainment district.

Together they represent roughly $4 billion in planned investment in a city of a little over 100,000 people that most of South Florida still thinks of as the quiet stretch between Fort Lauderdale and Boca.

They are also very different animals, and not in the way the headlines usually suggest. The Pomp is private capital assembling a district on contiguous land it controls outright. The new downtown is public land and public process, contractually committed but stalled for two years on a question that is narrower than it looks: not whether to build, but how to pay.

There is also real, documented controversy attached to both, including a fight over a community center named for the city's first Black mayor and the legislated death of a 58-year-old racetrack.

Here is what is verified.

Project one: the new downtown and the Innovation District

The land. Pompano Beach did not have a real downtown. Starting roughly three decades ago, the city and its Northwest CRA began assembling parcels to build one. The problem, as the city's own planning consultants later described it, was that the acquired land was not contiguous. Scattered vacant lots attract illegal dumping and blight, not developers, and private investors kept passing the city by despite all the available acreage.

By the time the city went looking for a master developer, the assemblage was described in city and CBRE documents as roughly 75.38 acres of publicly owned land along the I-95 corridor and to the east, with individual parcels ranging from about 0.2 to 8.35 acres. Older city materials describe more than 30 acres assembled within a roughly 70-acre Innovation District. Both figures appear in official documents and measure slightly different things.

The plan. The downtown is organized into four quadrants: the Old Town District, the Civic Commons District containing city hall and the library and cultural center, the Innovation District with Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard as its main street between Dixie Highway and I-95, and a residential area.

An earlier market analysis called for roughly 750,000 square feet of office and flex space, 200,000 square feet of retail and restaurant, 1,500 residential units, a 420-room hotel and a new City Hall. Current descriptions put full build-out at roughly 4 to 4.2 million square feet across retail, residential, office, hotel, civic and public space, at about $2 billion, over a decade or more, with private land sales and construction stretching into the 2030s.

The developer, and the one-bidder problem. CBRE marketed the opportunity. Two finalists presented publicly: Related Urban Development Group, part of Jorge Perez's Related Group, and Atlanta-based RocaPoint Partners, whose prior work includes Halcyon in Georgia and University Ridge in South Carolina.

At the October 12, 2023 CRA board meeting called to rank the two, Related Urban withdrew its application. That left one bidder. The board approved RocaPoint 5-1, with board member Beverly Perkins voting no, at a meeting that drew ten public speakers.

The Master Development Agreement with RocaPoint, operating through its affiliate RP Pompano, LLC, was approved at a special joint meeting on June 20, 2024, on a 4-2 vote. The agreement obligates the city and CRA to construct civic facilities, meaning City Hall, a parking garage and a community center, and to fund master infrastructure. It requires RocaPoint to deliver quarterly progress reports and semi-annual community outreach meetings, and it makes the developer responsible for designing, permitting and constructing the civic buildings and infrastructure, acquiring additional parcels, and eventually marketing the non-government parcels.

The financing fight, explained properly

This is where most coverage, including our own first pass at this story, gets it wrong. The commission has not refused to build a downtown. It has repeatedly failed to agree on which of two financing paths to use.

Under the June 2024 agreement, the developer has the default obligation to deliver and privately finance the civic buildings, with the city making annual lease payments. Public financing, where the city or CRA issues debt directly, is an option the city can elect. That distinction came from the city's outside public-private partnership counsel, Eric Singer, at the May 14, 2025 meeting. Singer also noted that the CRA's obligation to fund the master infrastructure exists independently of any particular bond issuance.

The city has been blunt about what happens if the option is not exercised. Its own public materials stated that if the commission does not vote on the public financing option, the city will either be obligated to choose the more expensive funding option or cause a delay.

The numbers. At the May 14, 2025 meeting, staff presented two scenarios for the civic facilities. Private financing: an annual lease payment capped near $12.9 million at an assumed interest rate around 8 percent, roughly $368 million over 30 years. Public financing: about $9.1 million annually at a market rate near 5.2 percent, roughly $268 million over 30 years. Staff characterized the gap as about $100 million in savings. The city has separately and repeatedly stated publicly that public financing would save taxpayers over $100 million.

The instruments involved are certificates of participation for the civic facilities, with aggregate principal not to exceed $137 million, and a separate CRA supplemental resolution authorizing up to $75 million in tax increment revenue bonds for master infrastructure. The CRA had roughly $3.6 million already budgeted toward initial infrastructure work.

What the infrastructure bond actually buys. The signature waterway running through the renderings is a drainage system. The city's position is that the bond funds an integrated drainage feature that doubles as a public amenity and creates waterfront development pads. Vote no, and each developer builds its own drainage on its own parcel, and the waterway goes away.

The underlying site work is substantial. RocaPoint partner Patrick Leonard described environmental remediation, raising grades to meet FEMA floodplain requirements, replatting, burying and relocating utilities, stormwater work and a new road network, and estimated roughly another year of work just to make the CRA pads developable.

The votes. On May 14, 2025, after hours of public comment, the CRA postponed its bond votes to June 4, 2025 to allow more review and outreach. Nothing was adopted that night.

At a special meeting in late October 2025, the measures came back and failed. Sitting as the CRA board, members considered Resolution 26-61 authorizing up to $75 million in tax increment revenue bonds. It ended in a 3-3 tie. According to TAPinto Pompano Beach, commissioners Alison Fournier, Audrey Fesik and Beverly Perkins voted no, while Mayor Rex Hardin and commissioners Darlene Smith and Rhonda Eaton voted yes. Reconvening as the city commission, members took up Ordinance 26-62, the up-to-$137 million financing measure. It also failed to reach a majority.

The consultant fight. Before those votes, Commissioner Perkins moved to remove and replace Redevelopment Management Associates, known locally as RMA, as consultant on all Northwest CRA projects including the new downtown, noting the firm had held the city's business for 16 years. After roughly 20 minutes of debate that motion also split 3-3, with Fournier, Fesik and Perkins voting yes and Hardin, Smith and Eaton voting no.

The alignments shift, and the dates matter. At an earlier public financing vote, one local outlet reported Hardin, Eaton and Perkins in favor, with Fournier and then-commissioners Andrea McGee and Barry Moss opposed. McGee and Moss have since left the commission, replaced by Fesik and Smith. Perkins has appeared on both sides at different moments. Any account of these blocs only makes sense attached to specific dates.

What is actually built downtown, and how far behind

Almost nothing yet, and the schedule slip is measurable.

When the master agreement was approved in 2024, the reported timeline had City Hall breaking ground in 2025 and reaching occupancy by 2028, with private occupancy starting in 2029. As of this writing, vertical construction has not started.

What has happened: HOK, the global architecture firm, produced 100 percent design development documents dated March 9, 2026 for the City Hall and parking deck at 125 Dixie Highway. RocaPoint issued RFP No. 01-2026 for construction of the City Hall and parking deck, with proposals due April 10, 2026, and RFP No. 02-2026 for Phase I infrastructure covering demolition, clearing, grading, utilities, stormwater, paving, sidewalks, hardscape, landscaping, irrigation and site lighting, with proposals due May 18, 2026. Both RFPs went out while the public financing question remained unresolved.

The Architectural Appearance Committee reviewed the design in May 2026. On a 4-3 vote in late May, the Planning and Zoning Board approved the City Hall site plan. Board members Carla Coleman, Paul Fisher, Robert Hartsell and Fred Stacer voted yes; Rich Dally, Gigi Doubek and Tundra King voted no.

The building is planned as a four-story civic structure consolidating 19 city departments, with a seven-story parking garage of roughly 600 spaces, at the northwest corner of West Atlantic Boulevard and North Dixie Highway. City analysis has held that the current 34-year-old City Hall does not meet the city's own building ordinances, cannot house all staff, would cost roughly $18 million to maintain, and that a new building would save about $1 million a year to operate.

Separately, the Atlantic Boulevard and Dixie Highway corridor project has been funded with $5 million from FDOT, $25 million from the Broward County Transportation Surtax, plus city GO Bond and CRA money.

The controversy: E. Pat Larkins and the Northwest

The downtown footprint runs between Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and Atlantic Boulevard, bounded by Dixie Highway and I-95. That is Northwest Pompano, historically the city's Black community.

At the center of the dispute is the E. Pat Larkins Community Center at 520 Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. Larkins was an elected official in Pompano Beach for 25 years and the city's first African American mayor. He resigned in 2008 due to illness and died in 2009.

City officials have said the existing center will eventually need to come down to make way for the project, with a replacement built elsewhere, and that a building bearing Larkins' name will always exist in the district. Architects for a new center were introduced at a community meeting this year. A location has not been decided. RocaPoint's Phil Mays has said the center could be reimagined at a new site or stay where it is, noting significant sentiment for keeping it in place.

Commissioner Perkins, who represents District 4, has been the sharpest voice against demolition. At March 2025 roundtables held at the center she said residents did not want it destroyed, moved or torn down, and that Larkins' widow did not either. She has also argued that even after the new downtown is built, the parts of the Northwest community outside the project boundary will still be living with blight.

Residents have pressed a broader case. At the May 2025 meeting, Northwest resident Ed Phillips summarized the recurring theme, telling officials that residents did not want to merely be seated at the table but wanted the means to take a share. Speakers asked for a new Larkins center rather than a renovation, a vocational and technical center, a college branch, minority business set-asides, and apprenticeship or local hire targets. At the October 2023 ranking meeting, one speaker asked how outreach could be meaningful after a selection had already been made, and another called the project an outrageously large gentrification project. Residents quoted by local outlets have described the process as gentrification presented through renderings and slideshows.

The city's counterpoint is documented too. The project's Additional Project Elements include residential workforce housing, local contractor participation, vocational training and a college resource center, and a small business incubator, alongside an amendment to the Northwest CRA Plan for affordable housing. CRA Director Nguyen Tran has pointed to partnerships including Habitat for Humanity, planned MLK Boulevard improvements and a possible medical center, and has compared the transformation to Delray Beach's. Supporters on the dais have framed the project as generational wealth building for a part of the city that has not had opportunities. Assistant City Manager Suzette Sibble has emphasized that this is a decade-long project with continuing public engagement, and staff argued that the cheaper public financing path would free up resources for exactly these community elements.

There is also history around land acquisition. In 2022, after recurring claims on the dais that the CRA had taken Black-owned businesses along MLK Boulevard, Mayor Hardin requested a staff review of eminent domain law and reported that no Black-owned businesses were taken except in connection with building the E. Pat Larkins Center itself. Perkins expressed doubts about that finding. The CRA has purchased and closed businesses in the area, including two stores on NW 3rd Avenue and NW 3rd Street, among roughly 18 properties it acquired in the downtown footprint.

We are not in a position to adjudicate this. Both the commitments and the concerns are documented, and the outcome will be visible in what gets built.

About that commuter rail

The Innovation District pitch often includes commuter rail. Here is the accurate version.

Pompano Beach already has a Tri-Rail station at 3491 NW 8th Avenue, open since 1989, on the western South Florida Rail Corridor. That is not downtown.

What the downtown plan anticipates is a station on the Tri-Rail Coastal Link, a proposed commuter service along the FEC tracks. Proposed Pompano Beach locations have included MLK Boulevard adjacent to the Broward County Transit Center, and Atlantic Boulevard at Dixie Highway. A crossover near Pompano Beach would let trains move between the two corridors, enabling a one-seat ride into downtown Miami.

The Coastal Link has been studied for more than a decade and remains unbuilt and largely unfunded. Corridor access has to be negotiated with Brightline; Miami-Dade's framework, reported at up to $50 million plus $12 million a year for 30 years, indicates the scale. Pompano officials publicly objected in 2023 to how the city was treated in Broward County's premium mobility planning.

Treat downtown commuter rail as a planning assumption, not a delivery date.

Project two: The Pomp

Three miles west, the picture is different.

What it is. The Pomp is a 223-acre mixed-use development at Racetrack Road and Powerline Road, a partnership between David Cordish's Baltimore-based Cordish Companies and Caesars Entertainment. Announced in May 2023, it is anchored by Harrah's Pompano Beach, which Caesars rebranded from Isle Casino Pompano Park in late 2022 after acquiring the property through its 2018 merger with Eldorado Resorts.

At full build-out the developers describe 1.3 million square feet of retail and entertainment, roughly 1.35 to 1.4 million square feet of Class A office, 4,000 residential units and two hotels. The name honors the former Pompano Park racetrack on the site.

What is open now. Harrah's Pompano Beach, with roughly 1,500 slots and a World Series of Poker room, and Topgolf, a 65,000-square-foot, three-level facility that was Topgolf's eighth Florida location.

What is coming. Live! at The Pomp is the centerpiece: more than 25,000 square feet of food and beverage including the national concepts Sports & Social and PBR Cowboy Bar, plus a central plaza for live music, festivals and cultural events. A development order for the Live! venue has been issued, as has one for a Publix plaza. The land use was changed to Planned Commercial Development and zoned as a Regional Activity Center in 2020.

The residential. According to TAPinto Pompano Beach, Lennar purchased land within The Pomp for $50 million and plans 344 condominium units and 82 townhomes. Despite early plans calling for two hotels, as of the start of 2026 none had been announced.

The controversy: what The Pomp is built on

The Pomp occupies the site of Florida's only harness racing track, and how that land became available is genuinely contested.

Pompano Park opened in 1964 and ran live harness racing for 58 years. In May 2021 the Florida Legislature passed a decoupling measure tied to the gaming compact negotiated between Governor Ron DeSantis and the Seminole Tribe. Decoupling removed the requirement that certain pari-mutuel permit holders run live racing to keep their far more lucrative card room and slot licenses. It applied to harness racing, Quarter Horse racing and jai alai, and carved out Thoroughbred racing.

The Florida Standardbred Breeders and Owners Association sued the state's Division of Pari-Mutuel Wagering, arguing there was no valid reason to treat harness horsemen differently from Thoroughbred horsemen, and that the measure was an unconstitutional special law because in practice it applied to Pompano Park and Caesars alone.

Caesars announced racing would end. The final card ran April 17, 2022, an Easter night with the biggest crowd in years, 16 betting races and a handle of roughly $1.43 million, the third largest in track history. The six-story grandstand had already been closed to patrons for years. Pompano became the 41st U.S. track to close since 2000.

This is not settled history. In early 2026 the Florida House passed a bill 77-34 to extend decoupling to Thoroughbred racing. Representative Chip LaMarca, a Republican whose district is near Pompano, said he supported the bill but had seen the results of decoupling firsthand with the closure of the Pompano harness track, and said he would welcome harness racing returning.

If you want to understand why some longtime residents are ambivalent about The Pomp, that is the context.

The controversy: Costco and the neighbors

The Pomp's master plan is approved, but individual site plans still have to clear the city, and one just did not.

On June 18, 2026, the Pompano Beach Planning and Zoning Board voted 4-3 to reject a proposed 163,084-square-foot Costco Wholesale on an 18.7-acre vacant parcel in the northwest corner of The Pomp. The store would have included a tire center, a gas station and more than 800 parking spaces. Board members cited traffic impacts and the scale of a big-box store next to the Palm Aire residential neighborhoods.

Three things make this notable. The Costco had already cleared the city's Development Review Committee and its Architectural Appearance Committee. Planning staff had recommended approval under strict conditions, and the board overruled staff. And the project had been publicly announced as coming: Commissioner Darlene Smith, whose district includes the site, told constituents it would create 250 to 300 jobs at a $20.50 starting wage for cashiers and an average rate of $26.77, with a target opening in fall 2027 and the existing Sample Road store expected to convert to a Costco Business Center.

According to The Real Deal, the rejection may not be final, and the city's zoning code explains why. Under Section 155.2407, a Major Site Plan is a final decision of the Planning and Zoning Board, not a recommendation. Under Section 155.2424.B.2, a party aggrieved by a final P&Z decision may appeal to the City Commission. An appeal is initiated by filing a written Notice of Appeal with the Development Services Director within 30 days of the date the decision is rendered, and the commission then holds a quasi-judicial hearing and may affirm, modify or reverse.

The standard is narrow. The commission may only modify or reverse if it finds competent substantial evidence in the record of a clear and demonstrable error in applying the code, and it decides on the record built below rather than hearing the case fresh. A pending appeal also stays city action on the decision. A party aggrieved by the commission's final decision may then petition the Circuit Court for a writ of certiorari.

In short: there is a defined path back, it runs through the elected commission rather than the appointed board, and it is time-limited. Check with Development Services for the current status.

The lesson generalizes: at The Pomp, master plan approval is not permission to build any particular thing.

Why anyone in Broward should care

The scale is unusual. Two projects, one city, roughly $4 billion combined. Nothing else in northern Broward is close.

It is the cleanest public-versus-private comparison you will find. The Pomp is private capital on contiguous land it owns, and it has two anchors open. The new downtown is public land, public process and a contractual obligation, and it has spent two years on a financing question while design and procurement ran ahead of it. Watching them side by side is an unusually clear look at how South Florida actually gets built, and at what public process costs and buys.

Property values move on this. Pompano Beach has drawn more than $2 billion in additional private investment beyond these two projects, including the Ritz-Carlton Residences, the Waldorf Astoria Residences and Related Group's Casamar on the beach. If you own in Pompano, in the Palm Aire or Cypress Bend condos near The Pomp, or in the Northwest neighborhoods inside the downtown footprint, these projects are already in your comparable sales, in different directions.

And it gets copied. Coconut Creek is building a downtown from scratch on farmland. West Palm Beach mined one out of century-old warehouses. Pompano is attempting both models at once. Whatever works here shows up next in Deerfield, Margate and Lauderdale Lakes.

What to watch

Whether the public financing option gets exercised. This is not build-or-not, it is roughly $100 million in long-term cost. A 3-3 commission has already killed it once.

Whether a City Hall contractor is awarded and vertical construction actually starts. Design is done and bids were due in April.

What happens to the E. Pat Larkins Community Center, and whether workforce housing, contractor participation, vocational training and the incubator land in binding documents rather than presentations.

Whether Costco appeals or resubmits a revised site plan.

Whether the two Pomp hotels ever get announced. They have been in the plan since 2023 with no operator named.

Whether the Coastal Link gets funded. If it does, the Innovation District's economics change. If it does not, downtown Pompano is a car-dependent district with a nice plaza.

Quick Reference

If you only have an hour

Go west. Start at Old Town Pompano around Atlantic Boulevard and Dixie Highway, where the Bailey Contemporary Arts building and the Ali Cultural Arts center show what the CRA has already delivered, and where the construction fence marks the future City Hall site at 125 Dixie. Then walk MLK Jr. Boulevard and look at the assembled vacant parcels, because that emptiness is the entire argument, in both directions.

Then drive fifteen minutes west to Racetrack Road and Powerline. Harrah's and Topgolf are open. The rest of those 223 acres is what a private developer does with a clean site and no bond vote.

Same city. Two completely different theories of how a place gets built.

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Sources: City of Pompano Beach, Pompano Beach Zoning Code Chapter 155 (2026 S-122), downtownpompanobeach.org, RocaPoint Partners, HOK project documents, TAPinto Pompano Beach, New Pelican, VillijNews, The Coastal News, The Real Deal, CitizenPortal meeting coverage, The Cordish Companies, Caesars Entertainment, Casino.org, BloodHorse, U.S. Trotting News, Thoroughbred Daily News, Chain Store Age, SFRTA, RMA.