Mile Marker 92.5: Why Tavernier's Publix Site Still Sits Behind a Fence

Barbara Froelich delivers the mail on the stretch of U.S. 1 where the county wants to put a grocery store. Every day she rounds the curve at Mile Marker 92.5 with her turn signal on, her hazards flashing, and a set of yellow LED lights running to warn drivers behind her, and she still worries about getting rear-ended. She told county planning commissioners as much during a public hearing last year. The curve she was describing sits directly in front of the chain-link fence that has surrounded a dead concrete plant for the better part of a decade, the same fence that's supposed to come down for a Publix.

If you live in Tavernier or Plantation Key, you already know the fence. You've probably assumed one of two things about it: either the fight over what goes there is still raging, or construction is quietly about to start. Neither is quite right. The zoning fight that defined this site for three years is over. The county closed it out on May 28, 2025, when the Monroe County Planning Commission voted 4-1 to grant the project's final major conditional use permit. What's actually holding the lot in limbo now isn't a courtroom or a commission meeting. It's a sequencing rule buried in the approval itself, one that ties the grocery store's opening to how fast a workforce apartment complex gets built behind it.

The fight that actually ended

For most of 2022 through 2024, the story at MM 92.5 was a straightforward land-use battle. The Toppino family and their partners at Blackstone Group Tavernier 925 LLC wanted to turn a defunct CEMEX concrete yard into a Publix, a liquor store, and 86 units of workforce housing built with the Jacksonville firm Vestcor Companies. The catch was size. County code capped nonresidential buildings at 10,000 square feet, and the original proposal called for 64,000. Getting around that cap required Monroe County to carve out a special zoning category, the Tavernier Commercial Overlay District, just for this one parcel.

The Tavernier Community Association fought that overlay from the start, with attorney Andy Tobin arguing the case at nearly every hearing. Their leverage worked, at least partly. The store shrank from 64,000 square feet down to 49,340. Tobin pointed to Islamorada's own Publix as precedent, noting that village staff had once persuaded that store to shrink from 50,000 square feet to 32,000, and he pushed Monroe County to ask for the same discipline in Tavernier. The county didn't go that far, but the reduction still happened.

The overlay itself survived a genuine scare. The state's Department of Commerce denied Monroe County's ordinance in May 2024, only to reverse itself a month later without much public explanation. The Tavernier Community Association filed an appeal of that reversal, and TCA president Richard Barreto later told members the group had to abandon the effort when a fundraising campaign for legal costs came up short.

The real reason the fence is still there

Here's the detail that gets lost in most recaps of this project, and it's the one that actually explains today's empty lot. The May 2025 approval didn't just permit a Publix. It made the Publix wait.

Buried in the conditions attached to the major conditional use permit is a requirement that at least 43 of the 86 workforce housing units receive a temporary certificate of occupancy before the supermarket and liquor store can get their own certificate of occupancy. In plain terms, apartments have to be substantially built and ready for renters before the grocery store is legally allowed to open its doors. The 86 units break down into 58 two-bedroom, two-bath apartments, 16 three-bedroom units, and 12 one-bedroom units, reserved for people earning up to 70 percent of the area's income, the kind of essential workers county officials have cited throughout the process: teachers, nurses, sheriff's deputies.

That sequencing wasn't a compromise the developers fought for. It's a mechanism the county built in specifically because the previous three years of hearings made clear that residents didn't trust a housing promise attached to a retail project unless the housing came first. So the practical timeline for a Publix in Tavernier isn't set by permits anymore. It's set by how fast a residential contractor can frame, roof, and finish walk-throughs on 43 apartments.

Here's how the approval timeline actually unfolded:

What this means if you drive this curve every day

The traffic questions that dominated public comment for years haven't disappeared, they've just moved from the hearing room to the highway shoulder. A traffic study by KBP Consulting found the project will add 2,184 daily vehicle trips in the immediate Tavernier area, a volume the county says the road can currently absorb. The bigger concern was Plantation Key, where the same study projected 1,638 additional daily trips, enough to exceed that stretch's remaining road capacity by 16 trips. The developer's answer was money, not asphalt: a $177,000 payment to Islamorada's free ride service over 12 years, meant to shift some of that trip volume onto transit instead of cars.

Access itself stayed a sticking point. The site has exactly one entry point, off the northbound side of U.S. 1, and for now that means a stop sign rather than a signal. Planning commission chairman Joe Scarpelli said during hearings that he believed a traffic light would eventually be warranted, and traffic engineer Miles Moss, retained by the Tavernier Community Association, testified that without one the location would produce hazardous conditions. County staff didn't require a signal outright, but they did make clear that no building permit would be issued until the developers document approval from the Florida Department of Transportation for the road work needed to handle delivery trucks safely.

If you want a preview of what a new signal near your commute actually looks like, you don't have to imagine it. The intersection at U.S. 1 and Burton Drive, the turn into Harry Harris, got a traffic light in early 2022, and what had been a free-flowing stretch of highway now carries regular stops and backups for anyone heading into that community. That's the closest real-world comparison for what could eventually happen near MM 92.5, and it's worth keeping in mind before assuming a future signal here would be a pure improvement to your drive time.

The grocery run in the meantime

None of this leaves Tavernier without groceries while the apartments get built. A Winn-Dixie already sits less than two miles away at 91200 Overseas Highway, and it's been the default stop for most residents in this stretch of the Upper Keys for years. Whatever eventually opens at MM 92.5, it's arriving into a market that already has a working option, not a supermarket desert. Attorney Andy Tobin made a version of this point during hearings, noting that Publix's Key Largo location alone pulls in roughly 20,000 shoppers a week and 600 trips during its five to six busiest hours daily, at a site with two entry points and a signalized intersection, advantages the Tavernier location won't start with.

The fence at MM 92.5 isn't a sign of a fight still being waged. It's a sign that the fight has been settled in a way that now depends on construction schedules rather than commission votes. The next visible change most residents will actually notice probably won't be a grand opening. It'll be site grading, foundation work on the apartment buildings, and eventually a temporary certificate of occupancy notice for the first wave of workforce renters, months or years before a Publix sign ever goes up.

For anyone tracking how Tavernier and Plantation Key are changing, from this development to the quieter shifts in what waterfront and canal-front property here actually offers, the Tavernier/Plantation Key neighborhood guide is a good place to keep watching alongside the news.

If you're weighing a move to this stretch of the Upper Keys and want a clear-eyed read on what a property here is actually worth today, reach out to Lisa Swanson directly, or start with her instant home valuation tool to see where your own numbers stand.