The southeast corner of Livingston Road and Veterans Memorial Boulevard in Collier County could be the site of a self-storage facility following a unanimous vote by the county’s planning commission March 7.  

The northern half of the 4.6-acre property in North Naples, east of Allura Naples apartments and south of the Mediterra community, is already designated for commercial use with plans to add a car wash and a gas station. The applicant, Livingston Veterans Commercial LLC, requested that commercial uses be expanded to the southern half of the property to allow up to 100,000 square feet of indoor self-storage. The entire property is limited to 100,000 square feet of intensity, so any retail space will take away from the allowed size of the self-storage facility.  

The concept member plan shows access on both Livingston Road and Veterans Memorial Boulevard with a private interconnect with Allura to allow residents of the complex to access the site without using the public roadways.  

Jerry Garland has been a resident of Mediterra since 2009 and owns a house directly across Veterans Memorial Boulevard from the proposed project. He expressed concern that this project is not an appropriate spot among all the residential development and that traffic is already expected to worsen once Veterans Memorial extends to U.S. 41 in the future.  

“This is going to be a highly traveled corridor, this is going to impact the quality of life of all the people who live there,” Garland said.  

Richard Yovanovich, a land-use attorney representing the applicant, reminded the planning commission that self-storage is a low-traffic generator. Additionally, the self-storage portion of the project is proposed to have enhanced landscaping buffers with 30-foot trees in front of an 8-foot masonry wall. Yovanovich said a gas station use could relieve traffic by the current nearest gas stations on Immokalee Road or Bonita Beach Road.  

“I think this will actually help people who are living in the area to get their fuel and not have to go down to Immokalee Road to get fuel for their vehicles,” Yovanovich said.  

Collier County Planning and Zoning Director Mike Bosi said staff now recommends the project after the applicant agreed to decrease the limitation of development from 150,000 to 100,000 square feet.  

The project will go in front of the Collier Board of County Commissioners at a later date.