Park becomes lockup for family
There’s no shortage of signs at the entrance to Gaines Park in West Palm Beach.
There’s the “don’t leave valuables in your car” sign, the “drug-free zone” sign, the “Warning! Alligators in water” sign in English and Spanish.
Tonya Preston just wishes the people who run the park would read the signs, especially the one that says in plain English it’s open until sunset.
Preston, of western Boynton Beach, organized her family’s Memorial Day picnic at Gaines Park because her mother-in-law, who lives near the park, is recovering from chemotherapy. Gaines, at 1501 N. Australian Ave., was close enough that it would be easy for them to come and go.
Well the coming went fine but the going, not so much.
The 35 or so family members got there in their seven cars and had a great time. There were the 2-yearolds, the woman who was eight months pregnant, the 76-year-old cancer patient and everyone else — a traditional, all-American holiday picnic.
The problem arose when it was time to go. One family member found the bright yellow gate at the front entry chained when she went to leave at 7:05 p.m. She drove the quarter-mile or so to the western entry and found it locked as well.
“We were just locked in,” said Preston, “like being a prisoner.” Two other carloads of people were there, too, unable to leave, she said.
Sunset, she pointed out in a complaint to Mayor Jeri Muoio with an attached sunrise and sunset calendar for documentation, wasn’t until 8:08 p.m.
It was more than an hour after that — at precisely
9:18 p.m. — that someone from the parks department showed up to release the unintended prisoners, after multiple calls to a nonworking parks department number, the police and a TV station.
They gave him an earful. “We were all asking him, ‘How could you lock somebody in like this?’ He said the park monitor does this, he does it all the time. People riding by on bikes in the neighborhood said this happens all the time. How can this happen all the time?”
The mayor’s spokeswoman, Kathleen Walter, by way of explanation but not as an excuse, said the parks people have a lot of parks they have to close at the same time.
But Mayor Muoio, in an email, said the city wants everyone to have a positive experience in its parks.
“We agree that this is unacceptable,” she said in an email. “We are taking steps to make sure that this doesn’t happen again.”
Preston, 57, is able to shake it off, because her mother-in-law wasn’t taken ill, the pregnant family member didn’t go into labor and nothing more serious happened than 35 people being inconvenienced for two hours. But someone should make sure the park is empty before locking it, the Palm Beach County permits specialist said.
“What really bothered me is that, OK, sometimes things happen. But that this should be recurring on a regular basis, the people you serve, you have no regard for.”
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