Boca Raton Memorial Park Master Plan: What Homeowners Should Know

Boca Raton's downtown civic core has moved out of consultant selection and into actual planning. On September 8, 2026, City Council approved the agreement that puts a master-planning team to work on Memorial Park and the surrounding Downtown Civic Area. If you own — or are considering buying — anywhere near Mizner Park, Royal Palm Place, or the Golden Triangle, here's what that approval does, and just as importantly, what it does not do.

Project status

Approved: a master-planning and public-engagement contract. Not approved: a final design, a construction project, a construction budget, or a construction timeline.

On September 8, 2026, Boca Raton City Council approved Resolution No. 113-2026, authorizing the City Manager to execute a professional-services agreement with Chen Moore & Associates for the Downtown Civic Area/Memorial Park Master Plan. This approval starts the master-planning and public-engagement work; it does not approve a final design, construction project, construction budget, or construction timeline.

• Agreement value: a base value of $519,925, with up to $52,000 authorized for contingency.
• Study area: the roughly 17-acre Downtown Civic Area and Memorial Park.
• Scope and duration: the work is expected to proceed through four phases over roughly six months — project initiation and listening framework, community listening, design charrette and concepts, then final recommendations.
• A milestone is not a start date: a master-plan milestone anticipated in early 2027 is a planning deliverable, not a construction start date.
• Still ahead: any final physical design, construction funding, permitting, and construction would require later City decisions.

Sources for everything in this box: the City Council agenda for September 8, 2026, the City's Memorial Park Project page, and the agreement backup materials filed with the resolution.

How the timeline actually ran

• July 28, 2026 — Council ranked Chen Moore & Associates first after finalist presentations under the city's competitive Request for Qualifications (RFQ) process, which also included Brooks + Scarpa Architects and The Corradino Group.
• September 8, 2026 — Council approved Resolution No. 113-2026, authorizing the City Manager to execute the professional-services agreement with Chen Moore & Associates.
• Current phase — master planning and public engagement. Not construction.

The distinction between those first two dates is the part that gets flattened in most coverage. A ranking is a procurement step. The September 8 resolution is what actually authorizes the agreement and lets the planning work begin.

What's inside the "Downtown Civic Area"

Boca's Downtown Civic Area is the cluster of public land that sits just west of the Mizner Park and Royal Palm Place retail corridors — anchored by City Hall, the downtown library, and Memorial Park. The study area covers roughly 17 acres. Unlike Mizner Park, which is a commercial mixed-use district, this is public civic land, which means any plan has to balance government function with everyday public open space in a way a shopping district never has to.

A master plan for a site like this typically works through how the park connects on foot to the surrounding downtown grid, what recreational and cultural programming the space can realistically support, parking and access for civic functions, and how the civic buildings themselves get addressed over time. None of that has been decided. The approved scope builds structured community listening into the process before a direction is set — so if you have opinions about what downtown Boca's civic core should be, this is the phase to engage with, not the finish line.

What the four phases cover

• Project initiation and listening framework — the consultant team stands up the process and the public-engagement plan.
• Community listening — structured input from residents, downtown business owners, and other stakeholders.
• Design charrette and concepts — working sessions that turn that input into alternatives.
• Final recommendations — the master-plan deliverable that goes back to the City.

A master-plan milestone is anticipated in early 2027. That is a planning milestone. It is not a construction start date, a funding commitment, or an approved design.

What this means if you're buying or selling downtown

Keep two things separate: a master plan is a study, and construction is a separate set of decisions the City has not made.

If you're evaluating a downtown Boca condo or home right now, evaluate it on current conditions — building quality, HOA reserve health, pending assessments, unit layout, and the walkability that exists today. Treat the master plan as context about the city's planning agenda, and independently verify the status of any future City action before you weight it in a decision.

We're not going to tell you what this plan will do to values in the area, and we'd be skeptical of anyone who does. Nothing has been designed, funded, permitted, or scheduled for construction. If a listing description leans on "the city's about to redo Memorial Park," treat that as a prompt to check the City's own record rather than as a reason to move faster.

It's worth reading alongside a related downtown item: parking policy also moved through Council this summer (see our breakdown of downtown Boca parking), and access is exactly the kind of detail a Memorial Park master plan will eventually have to solve for too.

How to verify this yourself

Everything above comes from the City's own record, and that record will stay current long after this article was published:

• City Council agenda, September 8, 2026 — Resolution No. 113-2026 as Council took it up.
• Memorial Park Project — the City's project page for the master plan.
• Agreement and scope backup materials — the supporting documents filed with the September 8 resolution.

One note if you're checking these yourself: municipal project pages are sometimes slower to update than the Council record, so where they disagree, the September 8 Resolution 113-2026 materials are the governing current record.

Our take

Boca is running this in public — a funded scope, a defined set of phases, and structured community listening — rather than settling a downtown plan privately. That's a reasonable way to do it. But an approved planning agreement is an early step in a long sequence, and the decisions that would actually change anything physical downtown haven't been made. If you're weighing a downtown Boca condo against a west Boca golf community or a home in Delray, we're glad to talk through the trade-offs as they stand today.