Developer James Batmasian’s plans to scale back his proposed Royal Palm Place Hotel project won approval from Boca Raton’s Planning and Zoning Board Thursday.
The proposed 12-story hotel at 200 South Federal Highway, 75 Southeast Third Street, and 194 Southeast First Avenue will have seven fewer hotel rooms and 682 fewer parking spaces than what the city approved in August 2022, after Batmasian removed plans to include below-grade parking.
Higher construction costs motivated the altered plans, particularly the elimination of underground parking, said the developer’s lawyer, Ele Zachariades of the Boca Raton-based land use firm Miskel Backman LLP.
The Royal Palm Plaza hotel will have 137 rooms under the new plans, instead of 144, plus 6,800 square feet of restaurant space, an 1,800-square-foot fast food establishment, 2,600 square feet of retail, 1,300 square feet of outdoor dining and 205 parking spaces.
The 149,000-square-foot development will be attached via pedestrian bridge to a seven-story parking garage with 501 parking spaces, 6,000 square feet of restaurant space and 2,700 square feet of retail.
Boca Raton-based architecture firm PGAL is the project’s designer.
About 9,000 square feet of retail buildings will be demolished for the project. The developer will also improve two surface lots and remove a fountain, Zachariades said. The Boca Raton City Countil is expected to take up the requests next week.
The development site is in Royal Palm Place, a 15.4-acre area with retail and multifamily that’s been part of Batmasian’s real estate portfolio since the late 1980s. Batmasian’s zoning application includes a request to reduce the number of required parking spaces throughout the property from 2,099 to 1,147 spaces.
A controversial figure in real estate, Batmasian received a presidential pardon from President Donald Trump in 2020 for a past tax evasion conviction for which he served eight months in prison back in 2009.
His real estate portfolio includes 3,800 apartments and at least 3 million square feet of commercial space in South Florida and the Boston area, according to the website of his company, Investments Limited.
Royal Palm Plaza is slated to be built about half a mile away from where Batmasian plans to build two 12-story hotel buildings with 242 rooms, within a mile from Mizner Park, and less than 4,000 feet from where Terra and Frisbie Group aim to build a 1.1 million-square-foot mixed-use project, if it can pass a voter referendum next month.