On September 8, Charlotte County commissioners voted 4 to 0 to approve the final site plan for Southwest Florida’s first Buc-ee’s: a 74,000-square-foot store, 120 fueling positions, and 740 parking spaces on about 28 acres at the I-75 interchange on Harborview Road, on the north side of the Peace River. The approval is Resolution 2026-306, and it’s public. If you live anywhere between Sarasota and Naples, you’ve probably already seen the beaver in your feed.
We want to say this first: Creek Engineering isn’t on this project. We haven’t seen anything the public hasn’t. But we’re a Charlotte County engineering firm, we sit in the same Development Review Committee meetings and the same commission hearings for much smaller versions of exactly this, and we’ve read the public record the way an engineer reads it. So this is us explaining what the headlines skip: what actually had to happen, in what order, over how many years, for a travel center to land on a corner of Harbor Heights that has sat mostly empty for decades.
Almost nobody outside the industry knows this process, and there’s no reason you would. It isn’t written down in one place anywhere. Here’s the map.
First, the part that took years: the land had to be re-imagined before anything could be drawn
The word you’ll hear from planners is entitlements. In plain language, an entitlement is the legal permission for a piece of land to be used a certain way, at a certain intensity. It’s separate from engineering, and it comes first. You can’t design a stormwater pond for a use the land isn’t allowed to have.
The Buc-ee’s parcel sits inside a much larger property: about 653 acres owned by Benderson Development between I-75 and Harborview Road. That property has a long history. It’s a Development of Regional Impact, a designation Florida used for its largest projects, and its original development order dates to March 1992. Benderson bought it in 2009. Earlier versions of the plan even included a public marina. On May 27, 2025, county commissioners rezoned the property to Planned Development (Ordinance 2025-020) and amended the DRI development order (Resolution 2025-178), resetting the whole property with three villages: a West Village of commercial anchored by the travel center, and North and East Villages carrying the housing and green space. The approved program at that point was 3,859 residential units, 50,000 square feet of office, 655,000 square feet of commercial, and 350 hotel rooms.
That is what a rezoning at this scale looks like. It’s not a form. It’s years of comprehensive plan work, traffic modeling, utility capacity analysis, environmental review, neighborhood meetings, and negotiation with county staff before the first public hearing.
Why zoning code has escape hatches (and why you should be glad it does)
Every county in Southwest Florida has a land development code that says what can go where. It’s a promise to the people who already live there: you bought next to residential, you’ll stay next to residential. That’s fair, and it’s the reason the code exists.
But the code can’t anticipate everything, so it builds in ways to say yes carefully. A conditional use or special exception lets a specific use into a district if it meets conditions the code already spells out. A variance relaxes a dimensional rule (a setback, a height) where the lot makes compliance unreasonable. A rezoning or planned development changes the entitlement itself, which is the heaviest lift and the longest process. As Erik Colleen, our vice president, put it recently: we live with the code we have on the basis of the commissioners we vote for, and we can try to get permission for exceptions or rezones where it doesn’t harm others. That’s the system working, not a loophole.
The Harborview project needed the heavy version. The land was being asked to hold something the original code never pictured, so the entitlement had to change, and that change had to be earned in public.
The site plan vote: what a 4 to 0 actually approved
This is the distinction most coverage flattens. The 2025 vote answered one question: may this land be used this way? The September 8, 2026 vote answered a different one: does this specific design meet the code? The county’s own term for what was approved is a Planned Development Final Detail Site Plan, application DRC-25-161, submitted by the owner’s engineer.
A site plan package for a project like this includes the site layout, parking and circulation, stormwater management, utility connections, access points, landscaping, and lighting, each reviewed by the county’s Development Review Committee against the land development code before it ever reaches the commission. When commissioners approve a site plan, they’re approving a design that staff has already found compliant. In this case the resolution says exactly that: the application went through the county’s Site Plan Review process, was recommended for approval, and the mandatory requirements in the Planning and Zoning Official’s June 24, 2026 decision letter became conditions of the approval. It’s the end of a long review, not the start of one.
Two things about this vote stood out to us as engineers.
The trade. The resolution spells it out. The Harborview DRI has a Land Use Equivalency Matrix, adopted with the 2025 approvals, that lets the developer swap one kind of entitlement for another based on traffic. Under that matrix, one vehicle fueling position equals 19.47 multifamily dwelling units. So 120 fueling positions cost the project 2,336 multifamily units, and the property’s remaining rights dropped from 3,614 multifamily units to 1,277. The 245 single-family units, 655,000 square feet of commercial, 50,000 square feet of office, and 350 hotel rooms stayed where they were. A 120-pump station uses up a lot of trip capacity, so the housing that would have generated those trips came off the table. Entitlements are a budget, and this is what spending it looks like.
The flood question. The site is in a FEMA high-risk flood zone on the Peace River, and neighbors and a local conservation group spoke against the location at the hearing. County staff said the dry retention pond was designed above the county’s own standard, sized for a 100-year storm, with the site elevation raised. One more detail from the record worth knowing: the board found that the county staff’s entitlement calculations, not the applicant’s, would control where the two differed. That’s a quiet reminder of who holds the pencil at the end. We’re not going to tell you whether the neighbors are right about the location; that’s a policy question and the commission answered it. What we can explain is what a dry pond does: it captures runoff from the roofs and pavement, holds it, and releases it slowly enough that the downstream system sees less than it would have from the undeveloped site during the design storm. The 100-year standard exists because Southwest Florida gets 100-year storms more often than the name suggests, and Ian was a reminder. The county also noted the project still has floodplain ordinance review and building permits ahead of it, and the resolution sets a buildout deadline of September 8, 2029.
Who builds the roads and pipes? Public infrastructure versus private
Erik’s first question when he sent us this story was the right one: what kind of infrastructure has to go in, and who owns it?
There are three buckets on a project like this, and every commercial development in Southwest Florida has all three in some proportion.
- Public infrastructure that stays public. The I-75 interchange is FDOT’s. Harborview Road is a county road. Any improvements to either are built to the owning agency’s standards and turned over to that agency. On this corridor, that work is already on the drawing board: FDOT has designed a widening of Harborview Road from two lanes to a four-lane divided road between Date Street and I-75, with pedestrian and bicycle facilities, and the county has scoped roughly 12,500 feet of new 12-inch water, sewer, and reclaimed water mains along the same stretch to go in with it. The county’s own project sheets put the road’s second phase at about $52 million and the utility work at about $16 million, both proposed for funding through the 1 percent local sales tax extension if voters approve it. Whether and when those get built is a public decision, not the developer’s.
- Developer-built infrastructure that gets dedicated to the public. Water and sewer mains extended to serve the site, turn lanes, signals, and in this case a roundabout, which the coverage of the 2025 approval reported the developer will pay for. The developer builds it, the county or utility inspects it, and it becomes public once it’s accepted.
- Private infrastructure that stays private. Internal drive aisles, the parking field, the on-site stormwater system, the lighting, the landscaping. The owner builds it, maintains it, and is responsible for it forever.
How does the county make sure the public isn’t paying for private impact? Through conditions of approval, impact fees, and proportionate share agreements that assign a project its piece of the cost of the road and utility capacity it consumes. The exact conditions for this site are in the agenda packet, and we’d encourage anyone genuinely curious to read them; they’re public.
Roadway impact: what a traffic impact study is for
Put 120 fuel positions and 740 parking spaces at an interstate exit and the first thing any reviewer asks is where the cars go. That’s what a traffic impact study answers. It estimates trip generation for the proposed use, models those trips onto the surrounding roads and intersections, checks the resulting level of service against the county’s adopted standards, and identifies the improvements needed to keep the network working. The county requires it through the DRC; FDOT weighs in on anything touching the interchange or a state road.
Studies scale with the project. A small site might only need a traffic impact statement. A mid-sized commercial project gets a minor study. Something like this gets a major study with intersection-by-intersection analysis and, usually, a list of required improvements attached as conditions. Coverage of both approvals references planned improvements to Harborview Road and the interchange; the specifics live in the packet, and we won’t guess at design details we haven’t read.
What this means if you own land anywhere near here (or anywhere like here)
A project this size changes the math for every parcel around it, and that’s the practical reason to care about the process instead of just the beaver.
Utility capacity gets consumed, and the next project in line may be the one paying for a line extension. Traffic baselines change, so the study your project needs next year won’t look like the one it would have needed last year. Comprehensive plan amendments open doors on nearby corridors that were closed before. And a corner that has been “someday” for thirty years is suddenly now, which tends to move land prices before it moves anything else.
If that’s you, the cheapest first step is finding out what your land is entitled for today and what it could realistically become. We call that the pre-application phase: conceptual plans and documented meetings with the agencies that will review your project, before you commit to a full design contract. It’s not high stakes, because there’s always a solution. The point is to find the answer for the price of a few meetings rather than the price of a failed submittal. We do this work in Charlotte, Sarasota, Lee, Collier, and DeSoto counties.
Questions worth asking before you get excited about a parcel near an interchange
Before hiring anyone, you want to ask:
- “What is this land entitled for right now, and what would it take to change that?”
- “Is there water and sewer capacity at the road, or am I paying for a line extension?”
- “What did the county require of the last big project nearby, and does that set a precedent for mine?”
- “Does my project trigger a traffic study, and which tier?”
- “What’s in the comprehensive plan for this corridor over the next ten years?”
- “How long did the last rezoning in this county take, start to finish?”
The answers are all knowable. Most of them are public. And every one of them is cheaper to learn before you close than after.
The beaver is the headline. The process is the story.
Southwest Florida is going to get its Buc-ee’s, and a lot of people are happy about that. What we hope you take from this is that the vote on September 8 was the last step of a process that started, on paper, with a development order in March 1992. Entitlements, then zoning, then design, then review, then infrastructure, then permits. Years of it, most of it invisible.
If you’re trying to figure out what your own piece of Southwest Florida can become, that’s the road we walk with people every week. Start with a conversation about the pre-application phase, and we’ll tell you honestly what we see.
Frequently asked questions
Is the Buc-ee’s in Port Charlotte approved? Yes. Charlotte County commissioners approved the final site plan on September 8, 2026, by a 4 to 0 vote (Resolution 2026-306). The underlying Planned Development zoning for the larger Benderson property was approved in May 2025. The project still needs building permits and floodplain ordinance review before construction, with buildout required by September 2029.
Where exactly will the Charlotte County Buc-ee’s be? At 25599 Harborview Road, at the I-75 interchange north of the Peace River in the Harbor Heights area of Charlotte County. The site is about 28 acres and anchors the commercial village of the roughly 653-acre Harborview planned development.
What is a land entitlement? The legal permission for a piece of land to be used a certain way and at a certain intensity, set through the comprehensive plan and zoning. Entitlements come before engineering; you can’t design a project the land isn’t allowed to hold.
What’s the difference between rezoning approval and site plan approval? Rezoning answers whether the land may be used a certain way. Site plan approval answers whether a specific design meets the land development code. The Harborview project needed both, more than a year apart.
Why did the developer give up housing units for the Buc-ee’s? Traffic. The Harborview DRI uses a Land Use Equivalency Matrix that converts one kind of entitlement to another based on trips. Under it, one vehicle fueling position equals 19.47 multifamily units, so 120 fueling positions cost the project 2,336 multifamily units. The property’s remaining multifamily rights dropped from 3,614 to 1,277.
