🌴 Fort Myers Brief: September 7 - 13

The week opens quiet and ends loud. Labor Day Monday is goats, free beer and an air conditioned movement class, and then the back half turns into the busiest stretch of the month. Offshore powerboats come back to Fort Myers Beach for three days starting Friday, the 25th anniversary of September 11 brings a brand new orchestra, a 5K and a film screening all to the same day, and the Home and Garden Show takes over the convention center for the weekend. Here is everything worth leaving the house for.

We recommend confirming with event hosts for complete details and current schedules

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🏁 Powerboats Are Back on the Water

🚤 ROAR Offshore Fort Myers Beach
📅 Date: Friday, September 11 through Sunday, September 13, 2026
⏰ Time: Practice and qualifying Friday from 11:00 AM, heat races Saturday at 12:00 PM and 1:00 PM, championship race Sunday at 1:00 PM
📍 Location: Gulf course off Fort Myers Beach, everything on land at Margaritaville Beach Resort
🏆 Details: The first offshore race here since before Ian, run this year as a Super Stock only field with 17 or 18 teams expected under new owners Cole Leibel and world champion Shaun Torrente. Friday afternoon is qualifying, Saturday is two heat races plus high speed exhibition passes at 3:00 PM, and Sunday at one o'clock decides it. The beach itself is the grandstand.

🎸 ROAR Offshore Kickoff Party
📅 Date: Friday, September 11, 2026
⏰ Time: 6:00 PM to 9:00 PM
📍 Location: License to Chill Theatre, Margaritaville Beach Resort, Fort Myers Beach
🎤 Details: Live entertainment the night before the racing gets serious, with the drivers in the room and the boats already in the water. Thursday has a welcome party in the same building from 7:00 PM if you want the whole run of it.

🕯️ Twenty-Five Years

🎻 Fort Myers Philharmonic Inaugural Concert
📅 Date: Friday, September 11, 2026
⏰ Time: 7:30 PM
📍 Location: Barbara B. Mann Performing Arts Hall, 13350 FSW Parkway, Fort Myers
🎼 Details: A brand new orchestra plays its first concert ever, and it picks Barber's Adagio for Strings and Mozart's Requiem to do it on. The 80 voice Fort Myers Symphonic Mastersingers handle the Requiem alongside four soloists, and the whole evening is built around the anniversary and the first responders who ran toward it.

🏃 Tunnel to Towers 5K Run and Walk
📅 Date: Saturday, September 12, 2026
⏰ Time: 7:45 AM
📍 Location: Florida SouthWestern State College, 8099 College Parkway, Fort Myers
🎺 Details: More than 650 people are expected, bagpipers open the ceremony, and food and merchandise vendors set up on campus afterward. Proceeds go to first responders and catastrophically injured service members, and walking it counts exactly as much as running it.

🎬 Sprinkles: Decoded, Cinema for Change
📅 Date: Friday, September 11, 2026
⏰ Time: 7:00 PM to 8:30 PM
📍 Location: Alliance for the Arts, 10091 McGregor Blvd, Fort Myers
🍿 Details: An interactive film about misinformation, alternative media and conspiracy theories, with director Andrew Korzenik leading the panel afterward. First special edition of the Alliance's new Cinema for Change series, and the audience is meant to participate rather than sit quietly in the dark.

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🏡 Home and Garden Show Weekend

🔨 Fort Myers Home and Garden Show
📅 Date: Saturday, September 12 and Sunday, September 13, 2026
⏰ Time: 10:00 AM to 4:00 PM both days
📍 Location: Caloosa Sound Convention Center, 1375 Monroe St, Fort Myers, FL 33901
🪴 Details: Two full days of windows, roofing, remodeling, landscaping, flooring, outdoor living, furniture, smart home gear and solar, all under one roof with the air conditioning cranked. Second most popular listing in this week's pack, and the only place in town where you can collect four roofing quotes before lunch. The Sunday listing is here.

🌸 Poinciana Garden Club Table Prep
📅 Date: Tuesday, September 8, 2026
⏰ Time: 9:30 AM
📍 Location: The Poinciana Garden Club, Fort Myers
🌿 Details: The club builds its Home and Garden Show table four days ahead, which looks like a chore on paper and turns into a morning with people who know plants. Worth it if you have ever wanted an excuse to ask a garden club anything at all.

🎄 Christmas Arrives Early

🎅 Christmas In September
📅 Date: Saturday, September 12, 2026
⏰ Time: 12:00 PM
📍 Location: The Sandbar and Grille, 4606 Tamiami Trail, Fort Myers
🎁 Details: The most popular listing on this week's calendar by a comfortable margin, which tells you something about how everyone is feeling four months into the heat. Tinsel, a bar and a September Saturday afternoon, played completely straight.

🃏 SWFL Super Card Show and Hall of Fame Signing
📅 Date: Friday, September 11 through Sunday, September 13, 2026
📍 Location: Lee County Civic Center, 11831 Bayshore Road, North Fort Myers
🖊️ Details: Three days of tables, cases, graded slabs and a Hall of Fame signing sitting in the middle of it. Bring the shoebox out of the closet and let someone who does this for a living tell you what is actually in there.

⛲ A Fountain, a Poem and an Open Mic

🏛️ Fall Speaker Series: The Tootie McGregor Fountain
📅 Date: Thursday, September 10, 2026
⏰ Time: 7:00 PM
📍 Location: The Collaboratory, 2031 Jackson St, Fort Myers, FL 33901
🕰️ Details: The story of Fort Myers' first public artwork, installed in 1913 at the tangle where Cleveland, McGregor, Main and Carson all came together, and quietly moved out to the Fort Myers Country Club in the 1950s. If you have driven past it a thousand times without knowing whose name is on it, this is the hour that fixes that.

🎤 Poetry and Storytelling Open Mic
📅 Date: Friday, September 11, 2026
⏰ Time: 7:00 PM
📍 Location: 1342 Colonial Blvd, Unit C18, Fort Myers, FL 33907
📝 Details: Read your own work, read someone else's, or sit in the back and listen to both. Small room, generous crowd, and nobody has ever been booed off a Colonial Boulevard open mic.

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🍺 Trivia, a Run and a Free Beer

🅰️ Free Beer Monday: A to Z
📅 Date: Monday, September 7, 2026
⏰ Time: 2:30 PM
📍 Location: 2161 McGregor Boulevard, Fort Myers, FL 33901
🍻 Details: Still free, still working down the alphabet one letter of beer at a time, and landing on Labor Day this week. A holiday Monday afternoon is arguably what the whole thing was designed for.

🧠 Trivia Night at Point Ybel
📅 Date: Tuesday, September 8, 2026
⏰ Time: 7:30 PM
📍 Location: Point Ybel Brewing Co, 2180 W First St Ste. 110, Fort Myers, FL 33901
🍺 Details: Free to play and taken far more seriously by the taproom regulars than any of them will admit out loud. Bring one person who watches sports and one who watches nothing but documentaries.

👟 Point Ybel Run Club
📅 Date: Thursday, September 10, 2026
⏰ Time: 6:30 PM
📍 Location: 2180 W First St Ste. 110, Fort Myers, FL 33901
🏃 Details: Every Thursday, run first and drink after, all paces welcome and nobody gets left behind. Convenient rehearsal if you signed up for the Tunnel to Towers 5K two days later.

🎧 Live from 2 to 5 at Point Ybel Brewing Co
📅 Date: Saturday, September 12, 2026
⏰ Time: 2:00 PM
📍 Location: 2180 W First St Ste. 110, Fort Myers, FL 33901
🍻 Details: An afternoon set in the taproom, no cover, no plan required. The low effort version of a Saturday if the boat race, the 5K and the Home and Garden Show all sound like too much.

🐐 Goats, Yoga and the Market

🐄 Goat Snuggling with Marsala the Highland Calf
📅 Date: Monday, September 7, 2026
⏰ Time: 10:00 AM
📍 Location: 13151 Pinto Lane, Fort Myers, FL 33912
🐐 Details: You sit down, the goats climb on you, and a Highland calf named Marsala wanders through supervising the whole thing. It burns an entire Labor Day morning and small kids talk about it for a week afterward.

🧘 Goat Yoga with Marsala
📅 Date: Saturday, September 12, 2026
⏰ Time: 9:00 AM
📍 Location: 13151 Pinto Lane, Fort Myers, FL 33912
🐐 Details: Same farm, same animals, downward dog stacked on top. The nine o'clock start beats the worst of the heat, and bring a mat you do not mind handing over to a goat.

🧘‍♀️ Poses and Pints Yoga
📅 Date: Saturday, September 12, 2026
⏰ Time: 9:30 AM
📍 Location: Point Ybel Brewing Co, 2180 W First St Ste. 110, Fort Myers, FL 33901
🍻 Details: Flow on the brewery floor, pint when you are finished, back in the car before eleven. Early enough that the Home and Garden Show still fits into the same day afterward.

🍅 Downtown Fort Myers Farmers Market
📅 Date: Saturday, September 12, 2026
⏰ Time: 9:00 AM to 1:00 PM
📍 Location: Fort Myers Farmers Market, Downtown River District
🧺 Details: Every Saturday, year round, produce and local makers and Kaye Krest's jewelry table sitting in the middle of it. It wraps at one, which leaves the whole afternoon open for whatever else you picked this week.

🏃‍♀️ Let's Get MOVING, City of Fort Myers
📅 Date: Monday, September 7, 2026
⏰ Time: 11:30 AM
📍 Location: Riverside Community Center, Fort Myers
💪 Details: Free movement class run by the city, indoors and air conditioned. In the second week of September that last part is still doing most of the selling.

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🌿 Free, Useful and Close By

📄 Resume Writing, Job Search and Job Application Workshop
📅 Date: Thursday, September 10, 2026
⏰ Time: 9:00 AM
📍 Location: 5100 Tice Street, Fort Myers, FL 33905
📝 Details: Free and hands on out on the Tice Street campus. Bring whatever version of your resume currently exists, however rough, and walk out with something better than that.

⌨️ Self-Paced Typing and Computer Digital Training
📅 Date: Thursday, September 10, 2026
⏰ Time: 1:00 PM
📍 Location: 5100 Tice Street, Fort Myers, FL 33905
🖥️ Details: Drop in, work at your own speed, leave when you are done. Free, and it pairs neatly with the resume workshop running the same morning in the same building.

💻 Senior Planet Lectures, Workshops and Courses
📅 Date: Wednesday, September 9, 2026
⏰ Time: 1:00 PM
📍 Location: 5100 Tice Street, Fort Myers, FL 33905
📚 Details: Technology classes built for older adults, taught at a pace that assumes nothing and rushes nobody. Free, same Tice Street campus.

💬 Uplift Peer Group
📅 Date: Friday, September 11, 2026
⏰ Time: 6:30 AM
📍 Location: 2506 Second Street, Suite 106, Fort Myers, FL 33901
🌅 Details: Early morning peer support downtown, same time every week. Quiet, steady, and there whether or not the week was a hard one.

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📰 What's Happening in Fort Myers

🔗 Lee Commissioners Are Staring at a $121 Million Hole
At a September 1 workshop, county finance chief Pete Winton told commissioners that if November's Amendment 3 passes and raises the homestead exemption by $150,000 next year and $250,000 in 2028, Lee would have to cut $121 million from its $766 million general fund in 2027-28 and $159 million the year after, with new taxing units, higher user fees, bonds and service reductions all on the table.

🔗 The County Wants to Erase 17 Community Plans
The Local Planning Agency voted 4-2 on September 2 to send commissioners a comprehensive plan rewrite that eliminates 17 individual community plans in favor of county-wide rules, over objections from Pine Island, North Fort Myers and Bayshore residents who argued it strips out local input and ignores realities like Pine Island having exactly one evacuation route.

🔗 Flock Cameras Are Coming Down Across Southwest Florida
After a September 1 Florida Department of Transportation directive pulled license plate reader permits from state roads, Cape Coral Police Chief Anthony Sizemore said his department will stop using the cameras entirely for lack of statutory guidance, Lee County Sheriff Carmine Marceno called the technology a double edged sword and agreed to comply, and Charlotte County Sheriff Bill Prummell said criminals are jumping up and down for joy.

🔗 Fort Myers Beach Wants Out of Its Flock Contract Too
Town Manager Will McKannay will ask council to end the five year, $15,000 a year deal covering four cameras on the Matanzas Pass and Big Carlos Pass bridges, saying he is not comfortable paying for hardware the town neither operates nor monitors with no formal agreement in place with the sheriff's office that runs them.

🔗 Two Fort Myers Beach Officials Are on Leave Pending a Grants Investigation
McKannay put senior administrators Jeff Hauge and Frankie Kropacek on administrative leave and is hiring an outside firm to review procurement and contracting on four grants covering FEMA funds, two beach renourishment contracts and the Bay Oaks campus, after the finance director flagged concerns during a budget review.

🔗 The Beach Is Paying a Consulting Firm Up to $580,000 to Run Its Finance Department
Goldman Wolfe LLC has covered finance director, accounting manager, budget manager and accounts payable duties since May after staff departures, and the town heads into September 9 and September 23 budget hearings with a maximum millage increase of 30 percent on the table, $629,030 in hurricane related revenue losses and $15.37 million in FEMA claims still pending.

🔗 The Ethics Complaint Against Sheriff Marceno Has Gone Quiet
Ken Romano, a former close associate of the sheriff, filed a complaint alleging unreported gifts and kickbacks, then asked to withdraw it on July 30 citing health issues after months of investigation, and the Florida Commission on Ethics has taken no public action and will say only that everything it does becomes public at some point.

🔗 Fort Myers Beach Gets Its First Look at the New Bay Oaks Pool
Opulent Outlines showed council a resort style replacement for the pool Ian destroyed, with a six lane lap pool, a separate children's pool, slides, waterfalls, water cannons, chickee huts and a giant alligator figure, funded from an $8.3 million federal disaster recovery block grant and buildable in eight to ten months once the design is approved.

🔗 Crescent Beach Family Park Is Finished
Vantage Construction wrapped a $1.3 million Lee County contract the week of September 2, turning the sandy lot between Margaritaville and Times Square into shaded walkways with restroom trailers, bike racks, picnic tables and benches, open daily dawn to dusk with 28 shade trees and 1,400 shrubs still going in.

🔗 Cape Coral Is Spending $500,000 to Fix a Road the Post Office Refused to Drive On
Council approved gas tax money on September 3 to inject grouted columns 40 feet deep at 12 spots under an 80 foot stretch of settling pavement on Northwest 16 Terrace near Chiquita Boulevard, after aquifer depletion loosened the soil and the USPS stopped delivering mail on the route over driver safety.

🔗 Measles Sits at 96 in Collier and 3 in Lee
Collier logged five new cases since August 15 to reach 96 of Florida's 144 total while Lee has held at three for weeks, and the county's roughly 89 percent kindergarten vaccination rate sits below the 95 percent needed for herd immunity against a disease this contagious.

🔗 Lee County Has the Second Highest Cyclospora Count in Florida
State health data for the week ending August 29 put Florida at 500 confirmed and probable cases with Lee at 42, behind only Miami-Dade at 61, in an outbreak the CDC traced to iceberg lettuce from Taylor Farms de Mexico that started making people sick on June 14.

🔗 A New Study Ties Rising Seas to Fewer Jobs Here
Research published September 1 in Environmental Research Communications compared 26 coastal counties including Lee and Collier and found that the 4.3 inches of average sea level rise between 2005 and 2021 tracks with fewer jobs, less business formation and slower growth in tourism, hospitality, transportation and utilities, though the authors are careful to call it correlation rather than cause.

🔗 A Dennis Drive House Just Listed for $13 Million
The Starr Team at John R. Wood listed 12798 Dennis Drive on September 1 with 5,400 square feet on half an acre, two waterfront primary suites, a 300 bottle wine gallery, a saltwater infinity pool and a new 600 foot seawall with two 30,000 pound boat lifts, on a property a trust bought in 2021 for $1.42 million and one of only three Fort Myers homes asking above $10 million.

🔗 The Twins Released Their 2027 Spring Schedule
Fifteen home games at the Lee Health Sports Complex in the club's 37th spring in Fort Myers, opening February 19 against the Rays, with the first Mets visit here since 2014 on March 3 and Red Sox Chairman's Cup games on February 26 and March 18, and ticket details still to come.