Collier County commissioners voted unanimously on July 28, 2026 to award a $7.59 million design contract for a flyover that will eventually carry Livingston Road over Immokalee Road. If you live in Livingston Woods and drive that corner most days, the headline probably reached you before this post did. What most coverage skipped is the part that actually matters for your daily routine: this vote pays for drawings, not asphalt, and the drawings can't turn into construction until a separate state project clears out of the way first.
That distinction is the whole story. The county just spent real money on a fix for one of North Naples' most reliably frustrating intersections, and the intersection itself won't feel any different this season, next season, or most likely the season after that.
What the county actually bought
The contract goes to Fort Myers-based DRMP Inc., and it covers roughly 30 months of engineering work: refining the roadway layout, sorting out drainage and utility relocations, redesigning turn lanes, and figuring out how to keep traffic moving while the thing eventually gets built. The concept itself is straightforward. Livingston Road would rise above Immokalee Road on a four-lane bridge, so through traffic never touches the signal down below. Anyone turning onto or off of Immokalee would still use ground-level lanes with a redesigned signal system.
County staff have pointed to the overpass at Golden Gate Parkway and Airport-Pulling Road as the template, a working local example of what happens when through traffic gets lifted out of a signalized intersection. Commissioner Chris Hall asked a pointed question during the meeting about how much east-west traffic the signal below could still handle with just one light, and Transportation Management Services Director Trinity Scott explained that a reallocation of green time, similar to what already runs at Golden Gate and Airport-Pulling, should help absorb it.
None of that changes anything for drivers this year. Design work does not stop backups.
The project standing in line ahead of it
Here's the part that rarely makes the pull quote: construction on the Livingston flyover cannot start until the Florida Department of Transportation finishes a diverging diamond interchange at I-75 and Immokalee Road, a separate project targeted to begin construction in early 2027. County officials have been direct about the reasoning. Building a county overpass in the same corridor while the interstate interchange is torn up would stack two major construction zones on the same stretch of road, which is exactly the kind of gridlock the flyover is supposed to solve, not add to.
So the sequence looks like this: FDOT's interchange work starts first, sometime after early 2027. Only after that wraps does the Livingston flyover move from drawings to dirt. County staff have estimated the full timeline at somewhere between five and six years from now to a finished overpass. Cost estimates vary depending on which piece of the project you're measuring. One figure puts the overall flyover project near $69.6 million. Another characterizes it as part of a larger $111 million package of corridor work. Neither number is final, and county officials have said as much.
If you're the kind of resident who drives past the Seed to Table corner twice a day, the honest answer to "when does this get better" is not soon.
What residents are actually feeling right now
None of this is news to anyone who has sat through the backup at that light during season. One driver told WINK News after the vote, "I've seen cars backed up. It's been pretty bad." That's not a complaint about the flyover plan. It's a description of an intersection that has been absorbing North Naples growth for years, sitting at the meeting point of residential expansion, school traffic, and the seasonal surge that hits every corridor feeding I-75 between November and April.
The Immokalee Road Corridor Congestion Study, completed back in 2021, is what first recommended a four-lane flyover as a fix for this specific intersection. It took until July 2026 for that recommendation to turn into a funded design contract. That gap is worth sitting with. Big infrastructure fixes in this county move on a timeline measured in years, not budget cycles, and the corridor outside Livingston Woods is a clear example of how long the distance is between "recommended" and "built."
The sequence, laid out plainly
| Stage | What's actually happening | Timing |
|---|---|---|
| Now through 2026 season | Design phase only. No construction. Intersection behaves exactly as it does today, worse in season | Present through roughly late 2026 |
| I-75 / Immokalee diverging diamond | FDOT interchange rebuild begins, a separate but related project that must finish before flyover construction starts | Targeted to begin early 2027 |
| Livingston Road flyover construction | Ground breaks on the actual overpass once the interchange work clears the corridor | Sometime after the diamond wraps, within the five-to-six-year county estimate |
| Finished flyover | Through traffic on Livingston lifts above the Immokalee signal | Estimated five to six years from the July 2026 vote |
That table is the part worth screenshotting if you're trying to explain to a neighbor why nothing looks different yet.
The number nobody should treat as a promise
Early modeling cited by county staff suggests the finished overpass could cut wait times at the intersection by roughly six minutes. That's a meaningful number if you're the one sitting at that light twice a day. It's also a modeled estimate from early in the design process, the kind of figure that gets tested and refined as engineering work continues over the next 30 months. Treat it as a working assumption, not a guarantee stamped on a construction sign.
The flyover is also one piece of a wider set of corridor projects Collier County and FDOT are running at the same time, including the I-75 widening from Golden Gate Parkway toward Alico Road, broader Immokalee Road corridor work, an evaluation of Logan Boulevard, and the Veterans Memorial Boulevard extension. None of those are simple add-ons. They're pieces of the same congestion problem, and county leadership has described the flyover as part of that system rather than a standalone fix. Which means the six-minute figure assumes the rest of the system gets built out too, not just the one bridge over one signal.
What this actually means if you live here
If your daily errands run through Livingston and Immokalee, whether it's the school run, a grocery stop at Seed to Table, or the drive out to Mercato or Waterside Shops, plan for the corner to behave this season the way it has for the last several. The design contract is real progress, and it's also just the first of several dominoes that have to fall before anything at ground level changes. The diverging diamond at I-75 goes first. The flyover follows. A resident asking "does this get better by next winter" is asking the wrong question. The better one is "does the county have a funded, sequenced plan," and as of July 2026, the answer is yes.
Livingston Woods sits close enough to this corridor that the pace of these projects is worth tracking even if you have no reason to think about real estate at all. Infrastructure like this shapes how a place feels to live in for years at a stretch, long before it shows up in a sale.
If you're curious how projects like this fit into the broader picture of North Naples, from Livingston Woods to neighboring Pine Ridge Estates, or you want a local read on anything else moving through this part of Naples, The Resop Team is always glad to talk through what's actually changing versus what's just been announced.
