Developers redesign Silver Beach hotel project in Daytona Beach. Here's what changed.

DAYTONA BEACH ― After facing a backlash from beachside residents, a South Florida developer and his partners have come up with a new, slightly scaled-down plan to build an oceanfront condo/hotel high-rise here.

They presented revised designs at a neighborhood meeting Tuesday night ahead of the Daytona Beach Planning Board's scheduled meeting on Oct. 26 to review their request for a rezone to allow the planned condo/hotel at the east end of Silver Beach Avenue.

Here's what we know about the project and what's different about the new plan:

It's a couple stories shorter

The new plan calls for the construction of a 25-story, 274-room high-rise, which would be slightly shorter and smaller than the original 27-story, 304-room proposal.

It's got a completely new design

Renderings for the project under the original proposal presented last year showed a futuristic curvy gleaming skyscraper designed to emulate ocean waves.

The new design shows a building that appears somewhat more squat, with three swimming pools. The first two would face the ocean on the ground level along the building's east side. The other pool would face west and would be on a rooftop deck on the seventh floor. The upper 16 floors would curve around the rooftop deck sort of in an L-shape. The 25th floor would also have a rooftop deck, but no pool.

The first floor would include a 1,400-square-foot restaurant and a lobby. Floors one through six would also include a parking garage. The property would also include surface parking.

The owners began buying the land parcels in 2005

Miami-based developer Eddie Avila and his partners, doing business as "Daytona Atlantic Development LLC," began buying the individual land parcels that make up the 2.6-acre development site in July 2005, according to Volusia County property records. To date, the investors have paid more than $12 million, including buying the parcels as well as coming up with designs for the project. The combined site previously had two shuttered 1950s-era motels, the Copacabana and the Lido, that were both damaged during the multiple hurricanes that hit the area in 2004. The buildings were torn down in 2007.

Avila in a interview last year with The Daytona Beach News-Journal said he put his plans to redevelop the property on hold because of the onset of the Great Recession in late 2007. He said he and his partners, which includes his son, kept waiting for market conditions to improve in Daytona Beach to where they could justify spending more than $100 million to build their planned luxury high-rise.

That time has finally come. "We feel Daytona is catching up with the rest of Florida," he said.

Why was the design changed?

The original design drew criticism from more than a dozen area residents who spoke out against the project at the Planning Board's June 1 meeting. Concerns raised included both the proposed 27-story height, the project's overall size and poor timing following last year's back-to-back tropical storms that caused severe erosion of the beach along Volusia County's coastline.

The Planning Board in late July agreed to grant the developer's request for a three-month delay in voting on the application for a rezoning of the property to allow the project to be built.

Avila in an interview following that July meeting said he and his partners wanted the extra time to come up with an "alternative plan" for the project that would address concerns raised at the June 1 meeting. He acknowledged the objections of the citizens who were "yelling and screaming" at the meeting, but said those pushing for the land to be turned into a park were unrealistic.

"What we're trying to do is see if there is a way to get to a compromise," he said.

The new plan calls for the condo-hotel to be built behind a new concrete seawall. The revised plan would also "double the side yard setbacks to significantly enhance the view corridor from A1A and the surrounding area west of the property," according the invitation to Tuesday's neighborhood meeting. The invitation was sent out by the developers' attorneys at Cobb Cole Law Firm in Daytona Beach.

"The development will revitalize this vacant oceanfront property and provide high quality visitor accommodations to our core beachside area," the invitation states.

This article originally appeared on The Daytona Beach News-Journal: Developers submit new design Silver Beach hotel project in Daytona