Ask three people on Tierra Verde when the marina fight will finally be over, and you will get three different answers, because there isn't one fight happening at the island's entrance. There are three, running on three separate clocks, in front of three separate decision-makers, and none of them can settle the other two.
That matters if you live here, because the easy read on the last eighteen months, court challenge filed, DEP complaint filed, DRC vote taken, makes it sound like a single dispute working its way toward a single answer. It isn't. And the island has been through a nearly identical version of this before.
A Fight the Island Has Already Won Once
The seven acres at 100 Pinellas Bayway South, the first thing you see crossing onto the island, have been fought over before Greenleaf Capital ever owned them. In March 2008, Pinellas County wrote a 50-foot commercial height cap into the Tierra Verde Overlay of its comprehensive plan. The following year, when a developer at that same site pushed for commercial construction that exceeded it, Pinellas County and Tierra Verde sued the City of St. Petersburg to block the project, and won in a case closed in 2010. That developer went bankrupt the same year, and the property was sold.
That cap was already on the books in 2011 when Greenleaf Capital, a Tampa-based firm, bought the marina for $5 million. For most of the next fourteen years, the site stayed roughly as it was: 314 high-and-dry racks inside a 58,000-square-foot storage building, 64 wet slips, a 24,000-square-foot shopping plaza, and a gas station.
Same Site, New Argument
In March 2025, Greenleaf reopened the question, pitching a plan for four 90-foot open-rack towers and 711 total dry storage slots, which would have made it the second-largest high-and-dry boat storage facility in the country. The scale alarmed residents not just on Tierra Verde but across Isla Del Sol, along the Bayway, and in St. Petersburg Beach. Greenleaf withdrew the plan just days before a scheduled December 2025 hearing, then came back in March 2026 with a scaled-down version: two towers at 72 feet instead of four at 90, and 500 total dry spaces instead of 711.
Seventy-two feet is still 22 feet over the 50-foot limit Tierra Verde Next says still governs the site. Greenleaf's attorneys argue something different: that a 2025 change to Pinellas County's land development code was itself improper under state law, and that the prior 75-foot allowance is what actually applies. That single number, whether the site's ceiling is 50 feet or 75, is the entire legal question now sitting with a judge in the Sixth Judicial Circuit. It is close to the exact same argument the island had in 2009, with a new procedural wrinkle attached.
Part of why this keeps recurring is a jurisdictional quirk most residents only encounter when a fight like this one flares up: the marina sits inside St. Petersburg's city limits, a legacy of an annexation the city approved years ago for the tax revenue it promised, but it is still governed by Pinellas County's zoning code rather than the city's. Two different governments, two different rulebooks, one seven-acre parcel.
Three Fights, Three Clocks
The St. Petersburg Development Review Commission approved Greenleaf's current plan on May 6, 2026, by a narrow 4-3 vote, after a meeting that ran past four hours and drew hundreds of residents in matching neon shirts to City Hall. That approval did not end anything. It opened three separate fronts that are now moving independently:
- A circuit court challenge. On June 9, 2026, Tierra Verde Next filed a writ of certiorari asking the Sixth Judicial Circuit to quash the DRC's approval over the height question described above.
- A state lease complaint. On August 3, 2026, the group filed a formal complaint with the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, arguing Greenleaf is out of compliance with the marina's existing sovereign submerged lands lease, a separate legal document from the zoning approval entirely.
- An environmental permitting challenge tied to the project's footprint and its potential impact on the surrounding water, which the group has pursued alongside the other two.
Winning any one of these does not resolve the others. A favorable circuit court ruling on height would still leave the DEP complaint pending. A DEP finding against Greenleaf would freeze the company's pending permits but would not touch the underlying zoning approval. That is the piece that gets lost in coverage that treats this as a single story with a single ending: there isn't a date circled on anyone's calendar where this resolves. There are three.
The DEP complaint is worth sitting with for a moment, because the argument is unusually concrete. The marina's lease for the public submerged land beneath it requires that at least 90 percent of its wet slips stay open to the public on a first-come, first-served basis. Geoff Comrie, who leads Tierra Verde Next's land-use and legal effort, put the core of it plainly:
"These are not Greenleaf's waters. They belong to the public. The state allowed Greenleaf to use them on the condition that the public retain access. That access appears to have been completely taken away."
The lease authorizes up to 89 wet slips at the site. The marina currently operates 64. By the residents' count, none are available to the public, with the space instead occupied by two private boat clubs, a boat rental operation, and pilot boats. Greenleaf has said it will cooperate with any DEP review. As of early August, the state agency had not said whether it would open a formal investigation.
What Actually Disappears From the Island
Beyond the legal filings, the approved plan changes something residents interact with directly: the existing shopping plaza. The strip center at the marina, home for years to a Subway and a bait shop, is slated to come down to make room for the new dry storage racks, upgraded wet slips, and a new restaurant, bar, and marina office. Greenleaf's own traffic analysis, using Institute of Transportation Engineers methodology, projects that removing that retail cuts vehicle traffic to the site by 37 percent.
For residents, the arithmetic of traffic reduction sits alongside a harder-to-quantify loss. Melanie Coleman Simon, the group's co-founder, described the towers this way to WFLA:
"It belongs in a warehouse, an industrial area, not a residential."
Whatever the circuit court eventually decides about height, the retail plaza's removal is baked into the approved plan regardless of how the legal fights resolve, since it was part of what the DRC signed off on in May.
What Happens Next
None of the three fronts has a firm resolution date. The DEP has not indicated whether it will investigate the lease complaint. The circuit court case, filed in June, is still working through the Sixth Judicial Circuit. And even if Greenleaf clears every legal hurdle, the company has said permitting alone would take six to nine months, with construction running another 18 to 24 months after that, on a single-phase build designed to keep the existing marina operating throughout. Construction, if it happens at all, is not expected to start before 2027.
If you live on the island, the practical takeaway isn't a date to wait for. It's that the next headline, whichever front it comes from, will settle one piece of this and leave the other two exactly where they are.
I've watched enough Tampa Bay waterfront disputes play out over the years to know that the ones with real staying power are rarely about a single decision. They're about who controls a piece of shared water, and how long a community is willing to keep showing up to say so. If you're weighing what a stretch of Tierra Verde, or anywhere along this coastline, is really worth given what's unfolding around it, I'm happy to talk through what I'm seeing on the ground. Aaron Hoffman - Let's Connect.
