For the first time since the start the of the COVID-19 pandemic, playgrounds at McAllen city parks will be open to the public on Wednesday as part of the city’s phased reopening of the 110 total play stations in the city.
As part of the first phase, 34 play stations located at 14 parks throughout the city will be reopened beginning Wednesday and will be sanitized once per day. Signs will also be posted at the stations to remind the public to maintain social distancing.
“The reason for the partial list is we still will have to continue to sanitize on a daily basis and we want to make sure we’re prepared and capable of doing so,” said City Manager Roel “Roy” Rodriguez. “We feel pretty confident we’re going to be OK.”
The playgrounds at city parks were among the first things to be closed off when cases of COVID-19 began appearing throughout the Rio Grande Valley in March but during a workshop held Monday, city commissioners said they’d received calls from the public asking for playgrounds to be reopened.
In a memo to Rodriguez, Parks & Recreation Director Mike Hernandez noted that staff would continually reset the barricades around the playgrounds but members of the public would still jump them or pull them apart.
“All along, like many municipalities, we’ve been trying to provide balance throughout the city and when the pandemic was at its worst, there was no doubt that we needed the parks to be closed,” Rodriguez said. “As time has gone by, people are starting to feel a little more comfortable with being outside, being in these types of environments.”
“There’s a lot of folks that have been calling and say ‘Hey, we want our playgrounds open,'” Hernandez said, adding that the city was trying to take precautions and looking at different recommendations.
Hernandez said the city understood the difficulty for parents in denying children the ability to use playgrounds so they thought it was time to open them up. However, the decision is going to require a lot of self-policing from the public, he said.
“They need to be able to take care of their children while they’re there and try and keep them safe at all times,” Hernandez said. “We’ll do our part by sanitizing them once daily and report our experiences with management and our elected officials to see what the next phase will be.”
The parks included in the first phase were selected to ensure the open play stations were accessible to residents all throughout the city, according to Hernandez.
“We tried to keep it even amongst our districts,” he said.
As to when the remaining playgrounds will be open is still to be determined as city officials plan to keep an eye on the number of COVID-19 cases in the area in the city and the county before deciding how to move forward.
Another factor as to which playgrounds will open next is congestion, according to Hernandez.
“We don’t have staff on site at these particular parks but the public is really good about notifying us, whether it’s on social media or calling us saying, ‘Hey, there’s way too many people at this particular site,'” Hernandez said.
But ultimately the city is going to play it by ear, according to Rodriguez.
“We don’t want to put dates out there that we’re trying to meet, what we prefer is let’s continue to be vigilant on how the region is doing with numbers and contractions of the virus and hospitalizations and so on,” Rodriguez said. “If they continue on the trend that we’re on, it looks like it’s getting better, maybe a month or two will show that we can open some more parks, maybe even all the parks.”
