Walk out to the fenced-off remains of Anglin's Pier on any given evening and you will find Anglin's Beach Café still doing steady business a few feet away, servers weaving between tables while tourists snap photos of the closed structure behind them. Aruba Beach Cafe, just up the shore, keeps its tables full at sunset with a direct view of the same broken pilings. The town's Sunday farmers market fills El Prado Park from December through May like it always has. Life around the pier never stopped. The pier itself did, and residents have spent years asking the same question on Facebook and at commission meetings: why won't the town just fix it?
The answer is the one piece of information most people in town still don't have. The town doesn't own the pier and never has. Anglin's Fishing Pier is one of the few privately owned piers left in Florida, and that single fact explains almost everything about why this has dragged on for nearly a decade with no firm end date.
What actually happened, in order
The damage goes back further than most residents realize, and the timeline matters because it shows this was never one storm and one repair job.
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| 2017 | Hurricane Irma causes the first major structural damage to the pier |
| 2019 | A repair permit issued the prior year lapses without completed work |
| 2020 | COVID-era shutdowns and supply chain delays stall the permitting process entirely |
| November 2022 | Hurricane Nicole collapses an entire section into the ocean; the pier is closed for public safety and the permitting process restarts from scratch |
| 2022 onward | The town begins levying code compliance fines against the owner |
| January 2026 | Geotechnical borings and subsurface testing are completed, per the town's own published timeline |
| March 2026 | The existing Army Corps permit for the project expires, with reissuance anticipated |
| April 2026 | Development Services Director Jhanelle Campbell tells commissioners the project may require a full replacement rather than a repair |
That last line landed hard at the April 14 commission meeting. For an hour, according to reporting from the New Pelican, tempers flared and frustrations were vented as officials laid out a worst-case scenario where the entire structure has to come down and go back up from scratch rather than being patched.
The fines exist, but they don't buy speed
The town's one real lever is code enforcement, and it has used it. Fines have been accumulating at $200 a day since the 2022 collapse, and by the April 2026 meeting they had reached $375,000. Earlier in the process, David Atkisson, a representative for pier owner Spiro Marchelos and Fisherman's Pier Inc., told the town's Special Magistrate that financing the rebuild "should not be an issue." The bottleneck was never money. It was sequence. Before the town gets any say in construction, the Army Corps of Engineers, the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, NOAA, and Broward County all have to sign off first, in that order, because construction near the beach can affect protected wildlife. A private owner has to work that chain alone, one agency at a time, with no ability to jump the line the way a municipal project sometimes can.
This is the part that gets lost in the Facebook arguments that have recurred for years. Resident Karen Armstrong once pointed to the rebuilt pier in neighboring Pompano Beach and suggested LBTS do the same "nice job," and other residents pushed back with the detail that actually settles the debate. As Michael Wielen summarized it in that same exchange, Pompano's pier is city owned, while Anglin's is privately owned, and that difference changes the entire mechanism. A city can fund, permit, and build on its own property using public dollars and public priority. A private owner has to fund it themselves and wait in the same federal queue as anyone else applying to build near a beach. Mayor Chris Vincent has acknowledged the town takes criticism on social media that isn't really its to answer, noting the pier is central to the town's identity and to why people visit, while the town's own role stays limited to code enforcement and encouragement, not construction.
What "closed" actually means right now
The pier isn't just fenced off at the entrance. As of last year's reporting, the town had closed the beach one block north and one block south of the structure to swimmers and fishermen, a wider safety buffer than most visitors expect when they see the fencing from the street. That zone has nothing to do with the businesses around it. Anglin's Beach Café remains open on the landward side, and Aruba Beach Cafe continues to operate along the shore with a view straight down the damaged structure. If your routine has included walking that stretch of beach directly beneath the pier, plan around the wider closed section rather than just the fenced footprint itself.
The town's own published timeline called for permits to be reissued this spring, bidding to go out to contractors by May, and construction to begin as soon as July. With today's date, that construction window has already opened or is just closing, but the April 14 meeting's full-replacement discussion suggests the schedule may be shifting again. The town's timeline has already slipped more than once since 2018, and officials have been careful not to promise a hard finish date given how many storms have already reset the clock along the way.
What hasn't changed while the pier waits
The rest of the town's rhythm has kept moving during all of this. The Sunday farmers market at El Prado Park still runs its seasonal schedule from December through May, drawing local vendors selling produce, baked goods, and crafts a short walk from the closed pier. Yoga-By-The-Sea continues to draw a regular crowd. The town has been ranked #4 in USA Today's 10Best Readers' Choice Awards for Best Beach in Florida, a reminder that the sand and water that made this stretch of coast worth protecting in the first place are still exactly what they were before Irma.
That contrast is worth sitting with. The pier has become the thing everyone talks about, the landmark residents point to when they explain what's wrong with the town's ability to get things done. But the actual daily experience of living here, the café tables, the market Sundays, the beach itself, has barely been touched by any of it. The frustration is real and earned. It just belongs to a private property dispute working its way through federal and state permitting, not to anything the town has failed to do.
The next update to watch for
The town requires the pier's owner or a representative to appear before the Special Magistrate roughly every three months with a status update, so the next real data point on whether "full replacement" is now the plan, and what that means for a rebuild timeline, will come out of one of those hearings rather than from social media speculation in between. If you want to track it directly, the town's own Anglin's Pier Timeline and FAQ pages get updated as new information comes in, and they're a more reliable read than whatever version of the story is circulating that week.
For now, the smart move if you live here is the one most residents have already made without thinking about it: stop waiting on the pier to reopen before you enjoy the stretch of coast it sits on. The café tables are open, the market runs through May, and the sand that earned this town its national ranking hasn't gone anywhere.
If you're curious about what else is shifting in Lauderdale-By-The-Sea, from the pier's next hearing to whatever opens next along El Mar Drive, Mari Juliette keeps a close eye on the town's day to day, not just its market.
