If you pull up the City of Key Colony Beach's own website this month, the agenda for the September 17 Commission meeting lists the location as "the temporary meeting place for the City of Key Colony Beach: The Key Colony Inn, Back Patio." Not Marble Hall. Not City Hall. A restaurant patio, half a block from the building the city has been trying to finish rebuilding since Hurricane Irma tore through in September 2017.
That's nine years. And the contractor on the current rebuild, Pedro Falcon, was given 273 days from the December 19, 2025 groundbreaking to reach substantial completion, a window that runs out around September 18. The commission was still meeting on borrowed patio furniture the day before.
Meanwhile, the restaurant lending them that patio closed abruptly and reopened in under half a year. The two timelines overlapped this year on the same stretch of West Ocean Drive. A single-owner restaurant renovation and a storm-hardened public building funded in part by a state grant follow very different schedules, and seeing them side by side explains why the Commission's meeting place looks the way it does this month.
The Nine-Year Repair
Marble Hall wasn't just damaged by Irma. According to reporting on the saga, the building sat in legal and structural limbo for years afterward, with a section of floor known locally as "the fault line" at the center of repeated commission debates over whether to repair the existing structure or tear it down and start over. City officials went back and forth on whether the slab had sunk under floodwater, whether a "substantial damage letter" had ever actually been issued, and whether the post office and administrative offices could safely reopen. A 2024 commission session was still discussing pin piles and foam injections to stabilize the floor, years after the storm.
The final plan that emerged wasn't a full teardown. It's a 12,400-square-foot project that hardens the existing Marble Hall and post office while adding a two-story, 4,200-square-foot wing to the south side, with a fitness room, new offices, an ADA entrance, and a second floor built to double as the city's police department and emergency operations center during storms. The projected cost is $5.5 million, offset by a $2.28 million grant from the Florida Department of Environmental Protection.
Mayor Freddie Foster called the road to groundbreaking one with "a few false starts," and told guests at the December ceremony that the project had been through "some birthing and growing pains" since Irma. Secretary/Treasurer Tom Harding thanked residents for their patience. Both were marking a groundbreaking, not a ribbon cutting, on a building that had been out of commission since 2017.
The contractual clock on the current build started that same day. Two hundred seventy-three days out from December 19 lands in the middle of September, right where the calendar sits now. As of the September 15 and 17 city meetings, the commission's own posted agenda still routes residents to the restaurant.
Five Months, Start to Finish
The Key Colony Inn, the building the commission is currently meeting behind, has its own 2025 disaster story, just a much shorter one. The previous owners abruptly left town in July, shuttering the restaurant with no real warning. The property sold for $3 million to new owner Jim Figueroa, who had already hired Michael and Amanda Lordi to open a separate, newly built restaurant called Water's Edge along Sadowski Causeway. Figueroa called the couple back the same morning they landed in the Keys as newlyweds: "You're gonna be a lot busier. We got Key Colony," Michael recalled him saying.
What followed was a gut renovation on a real deadline. The bar got moved to make room for booth seating, the old carpet came off the ceiling, and by the time Keys Weekly sat down with the Lordis, the dining room furniture was already gone and painters were already at work. The couple's stated goal wasn't a quick flip. "This is where our passion is," Michael said, describing a rotating Italian-driven menu built around dishes like veal chop alla vodka and homemade pastas rather than a straightforward reopening for reopening's sake.
The Inn at Key Colony opened its doors on December 1, 2025, with dinner service starting at 5 p.m. and a lounge menu following soon after. Total time from an owner walking out the door to a new kitchen serving Wagyu meatballs and slow-simmered red sauce: about five months.
The Inn's kitchen isn't the only thing that came out of that stretch. It now also serves as a commissary for the still-forthcoming Water's Edge along the causeway, and for a planned convenience store and sandwich shop slated for the former site of Causeway Pizza. One closure turned into three hospitality projects moving at once, under one ownership group, in the same calendar window that the city's single public building was still working through architectural drawings for its addition.
What the Overlap Actually Tells You
None of this means Key Colony Beach's government moves slowly as a rule. The city found $60,000-plus in Monroe County Tourist Development Council funding to give Sunset Park a real refresh this year: shade sails over the lawn and over the performance area, a new ADA-compliant walkway, and refreshed landscaping recognized by the city's own Beautification Committee. That project was finished fast enough to celebrate with a free cookout and concert on January 11, an expanded version of the department's recurring "Hot Dogs with the Cops" series, backed by the Beautification Committee and the Key Colony Beach Fishing and Boating Club, with three hours of live music from the 79th Street Band.
Sunset Park shows the city can complete a capital project on a short schedule. Marble Hall carries a heavier scope: storm hardening of the existing building, a two-story addition, a police department, an emergency operations center and a state grant tied to the work. A building with that many jobs to do, and a decision history stretching back to 2017, takes longer to finish than a dining room and a bar.
The Choice in Front of Voters This Fall
Key Colony Beach also has a City Commission election on the ballot this November, with two seats open. Incumbent Mayor Freddie Foster and Commissioner Kirk Diehl are both seeking new terms, facing challenger Lynne Benton, who currently serves on the city's Planning & Zoning Board and has professional background as an engineer, mediator, and attorney. Benton has framed her campaign around wanting to "help our community define and preserve what makes Key Colony Beach so special" as leadership changes. Whatever residents decide, the next commission inherits a City Hall project at or near its completion window, and a city that has already finished the Sunset Park refresh.
If you've been watching Key Colony Beach from a canal-front lot or a condo on West Ocean Drive and wondering how any of this touches your own property or your own street, that's exactly the kind of on-the-ground detail Ally Kelley tracks by staying close to the city's own meetings, not just its market data. Request a private consultation if you want a read on how a specific address in Key Colony Beach fits into everything happening around it this year.
