The standoff in Boca Raton started with a prayer.
“As we conduct the people’s business here today, we pray that we do so with wisdom, maintaining a sense of proportion,” Boca Raton City Council Member Andy Thomson said.
The call wasn’t exactly answered.
Thomson was presiding over a city council meeting in February 2025 at which elected officials would select a partner for a major public-private redevelopment. By the end of the meeting, Thomson and the council unanimously approved a bid from Terra and Frisbie Group for a 2.5 million-square-foot multi-use project on Boca’s aging government campus, 30 acres of public land. The vision was to transform Boca’s downtown into a tropical modern transit-oriented mini metropolis fit for an emerging hub of wealth and commerce. It was called “One Boca.”
One Boca had its skeptics. Where some saw a beautiful update, others saw a travesty of monstrous proportions. At issue was the project site, which included Boca’s 17-acre Memorial Park, named in 1947 to honor World War II veterans. The current city hall, community center, two baseball fields, a skate park, shuffleboard courts, the Boca Raton Tennis Center and six beloved banyan trees all sit within Memorial Park.
The way Jon Pearlman saw it, “they were going to destroy all of that and build high-rise condos.”
Pearlman, a resident and tennis player who knew the Memorial Park courts well, had never been involved in community organizing before One Boca. But after he started talking to neighbors, he chartered a grassroots movement, gathering signatures for petitions to fight the project. He called it “Save Boca.”
“The world is changing faster than it ever has before. We don’t want to miss the future.”
Coconut Grove-based Terra, led by David Martin, has wrangled with public dissent before. So has its partner, the Palm Beach-based family firm Frisbie, led by Rob Frisbie Jr. and his brother-in-law Cody Crowell.
“In the beginning, there were some very serious concerns that would resonate with a lot of people,” Frisbie said, acknowledging the resistance around parkland preservation and honoring veterans.
As local development fights so often do, things got heated. Terra and Frisbie adapted plans to heed Save Boca’s major concerns, but the group remained staunch in its opposition, Frisbie said. Decorum lapsed at tense city meetings. Lawsuits were filed. City officials, Terra, Frisbie, Pearlman and even appraisers were all at some point accused of ill intentions, of lying, of misleading “the people.”
But allegations of compromised public servants and systems silenced a simpler truth: Boca was changing, and to many of its residents, it was too much, too fast.
The events that came next suggest that developer-community standoffs have reached a new pitch in an age of fraying truth and trust. Within six months of that first vote on the One Boca bid, wisdom and any sense of proportion were gone. A developer might note the rise of distrust and conspiratorial thinking elsewhere in society, but it’s hard to prepare for when your project inspires the rallying cry to revolt.
Seeing few other options, Terra, Frisbie and the city council agreed to a new approach. By the end of the summer they had conceded to send One Boca to a referendum, leaving the future of the project up to the people.
“I hope that they take the time to consider the facts and vote their conscience,” Mayor Scott Singer said.
The vote is set for Tuesday, March 10.
How it started
Boca had been looking at redeveloping its government campus for years. The facilities are more than 30 years old and have damage from floods. The city’s bidding process for the project pitted titans of South Florida real estate against one another.
Martin’s Terra and Frisbie teamed up on a proposal. Also in the mix was Related Ross, the West Palm Beach-based Goliath helmed by billionaire Steve Ross.
Martin is no amateur, but he was sidling up to Ross on his home turf. For Frisbie and Crowell, the campus redevelopment was an opportunity to level up. The company, founded by Frisbie’s father and uncles, has historically focused on small, luxury projects: spec homes, townhomes, a boutique resort in the Florida Keys. The second generation has grander ambitions. They have partnered with 1789 Capital on a $1 billion real estate investment fund and are planning another project with Martin with more than 1,000 residential units.
They had some early stumbles. In 2021, they partnered with Hines to buy a West Palm Beach development site and planned a Robert A.M. Stern-designed condo project now known as South Flagler House. After a legal spat with Two Roads Development, the partners sold the project to Steve Ross for $194.6 million. The Frisbie Group’s Suzanne Frisbie is leading sales with the Corcoran Group at the project. In 2024, the family sought to redevelop a rare 5.8-acre Palm Beach site, but local pushback killed the project.
One Boca represents an untested scale and scope for the Frisbies, a project that could establish them on the new path.
Their initial vision for One Boca spanned a 30-acre city-owned site at 201 West Palmetto Park Road. Designed by Kohn Pedersen Fox, the architecture firm that envisioned Hudson Yards in New York and Covent Garden in London, it would have 250,000 square feet of offices, 157,000 square feet of retail, 1,129 residential units, a 150-key hotel and 3,434 parking spaces, all adjacent to the city’s Brightline station.
The developers would replace the existing city hall with one totaling 100,000 square feet, as well as a 50,600-square-foot community center. In this iteration of the proposal, the city planned to sign a 99-year lease with Terra and Frisbie, with the developers paying $5.1 million in annual rent. Their projections showed the developers paying the city more than $3 billion over the course of the lease.
Glossy renderings showed a smooth, bright, lushly landscaped civic center packed with pedestrians relishing the spectacular Boca of tomorrow.
“The world is changing faster than it ever has before,” Crowell said. “We don’t want to miss the future.”
The future is Florida
The pandemic instigated a generational boom in South Florida. In Boca, single-family home prices nearly doubled in a five-year span. A town that 60 years ago did not have a hospital was becoming a magnet for billionaires who liked the low taxes and private airport.
This spurred a wave of real estate investment unparalleled almost anywhere in the country. Residents in Boca watched what happened as developers poured billions into projects across the region, with particular concentration in Miami, Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach. Some didn’t want to be part of the wave.
“Boca Raton is not what West Palm Beach is becoming,” Pearlman said. “It’s not a Fort Lauderdale and it’s not a Miami.”
The sartorial signature of his opposition movement is a graphic T-shirt in stark white with a bright green block around the navy text: SAVE BOCA. Every email, flyer and blog post from the organization comes bolded, in all caps, seeming to mimic the urgent, assertive speaking style of the group’s founder.
Speaking from the podium is new for Pearlman, who works in investment management. The former Harvard tennis player also started a fitness brand, Mission Lean, with his wife Lyudmila Bouzinova, a one-time “America’s Next Top Model” contestant.
He has compared the One Boca project to destroying Central Park. On Save Boca’s YouTube channel, a video of AI-generated bulldozers plowing down Memorial Park’s banyan trees has more than 80,000 views.
After its launch, Save Boca issued two nearly identical petitions. They called for city ordinance and charter amendments that would restrict the city’s ability to lease and sell its public lands. Under Save Boca’s proposed laws, decisions concerning public parcels half an acre or larger would require a referendum.
This would mean that nearly every public land use decision would require mobilizing the electorate. City officials raised the alarm.
“If the ordinance proposed by this petition had been in place, Boca Raton would’ve lost out on our new Blue Lake Elementary School and more than a thousand needed student seats,” Singer, the mayor, wrote in a statement in July.
Through the summer, support for Save Boca swelled. By September, Pearlman had thousands of signatures, although the precise count is a source of debate between the Save Boca and One Boca camps. Pearlman claims Save Boca has 12,900 supporters throughout the city. According to Singer, that is a double count of about 6,000 people who signed both petitions.
After submitting the petitions to send his proposals to a vote, Pearlman started expanding his political movement. He launched a campaign for city council in October, running against incumbent Marc Widger, a consistent supporter of One Boca. The mounting support for the Save Boca laws inspired concerns from a new entrant: locals who feared the consequences of handicapping city decisionmaking. In November, attorney Ned Kimmelman filed suit against Pearlman and Save Boca, seeking an emergency injunction to block the referendums concerning the public land use rules.
“Save Boca and Pearlman are conducting an audacious scheme to evade Florida law and abuse our electoral process in Palm Beach County and the City,” the lawsuit read.
Within a few weeks, the judge granted the injunction. Kimmelman responded to the decision in a letter to the editor published in the Boca Raton Tribune.
“You don’t use an atomic bomb to kill a single government project or anything else, for that matter, because it will kill you, too,” he wrote. “To the good people who got snookered and almost destroyed our city, they need to read the tale of the Pied Piper of Hamelin because it almost happened to them, to all of us. Jon Pearlman and all of the Save Boca founders cannot be permitted to run for public office.”
The lawsuit is ongoing. Like so many elements of the battle over One Boca, the divergent sides disagree on the details. They give alternating reasons for why the judge granted the injunction, and whether Pearlman’s proposed laws were themselves legal.
Asked why he thinks Kimmelman sued him, Pearlman said, “I have no idea about his motivations, but everything he alleges is false.”
Facts and fictions
This isn’t the first time Terra, Frisbie or the Boca electeds have encountered unhappy communities. Developers have playbooks for this kind of fight: collaborate, make concessions, give back.
“One of his main attributes, especially when dealing with government, is listening to what the other side needs, and trying to get them what they need,” Bilzin Sumberg attorney Suzanne Amaducci said of Martin, Terra’s head, in The Real Deal profile of Martin from 2024.
Against the backdrop of Save Boca’s allegations and demands, Terra and Frisbie have altered their proposal, keeping it alive. In September, they reduced the scale of the project, and in October, they shrunk it again.
That doesn’t mean the mega project has necessarily gone miniature. The 99-year lease between the city and the developers includes 7.8 acres, and One Boca will cover 538,000 square feet. The plans include 120,000 square feet of office, a 30,000-square-foot grocery store, 765 apartments, a 180-key hotel and 2,100 parking spaces. Terra and Frisbie are also in contract to buy the adjacent 0.8-acre site at 140 Northwest 4th Street, where they plan a 182-unit condominium. Recreation and green space increases from 7.6 acres to 15.6 acres. Projections now show One Boca generating $4 billion in revenue for the city from rent and tax revenues over the life of the deal. Terra and Frisbie have also agreed to maintain their contributions to Boca even if Gov. Ron DeSantis is successful in his push to abolish property taxes. Under the latest plan, the city will lead the redesign of Memorial Park and its playgrounds, tennis courts and other recreational uses. It would also include a dedicated veterans memorial. The baseball fields would be relocated, as would the police department’s headquarters. The Memorial Park site would still include a redeveloped city hall, community center and police substation.
On Jan. 20, seven weeks before the referendum, the city council voted to approve the Master Partnership Agreement (MPA) with Terra and Frisbie, officially sending this proposal to the March ballot.
But the changes have done nothing to sway Pearlman, who continues to assert that the developers aren’t preserving the park. He also suggests Boca has plenty of money to redevelop city hall on its own, claiming it has more than $600 million in the bank, which Singer denies.
“The city could not pay for these improvements just from existing funds,” he said. Without a public private partnership, Boca would need to raise taxes, do a bond or cut funding for services to afford the needed updates.
As of publication, both sides are projecting confidence.
“The fate of this project could very well shape the entire future of this city,” Pearlman said. He still maintains that Terra and Frisbie will bulldoze the banyans, cut off access to Memorial Park and inflate the revenue benefits for the city.
“Some people just live in a state of confusion,” Frisbie’s Crowell said. “The other side has not been listening.”
He insists the developers are listening to citizens. “People can trust us.”