HARLINGEN — Night-time hoops is on the road to reality at Rangerville Park.
Officials with the Parks and Recreation Department outlined their plans for one of the city’s less-developed urban spaces with plans for a new lighted basketball court.
“We just received the basketball poles with the backboards and the nets, all that good stuff,” Parks Superintendent Armando Villela told the parks board this week.
City workers are extending conduit and power to the courts from the pavilion near Rangerville Road.
“When they are finished, we will be installing lighting for that one basketball court,” Villela added. “It’s similar to what we did at Pendleton Park. It’s not exactly field lighting, or sports lighting, but it’s enough for them to play at night.”
One of the issues in developing 30-acre Rangerville Park which the new basketball court must overcome is how low-lying the area is. Standing water often can be seen in certain areas of the park.
Assistant Parks Director David Arce said the plan is to build up the area where the concrete basketball court will be sited.
“Go down 12 inches, and up 18 or 20,” Arce said, adding the court would be concrete, not asphalt.
Parks and rec officials say Rangerville Park is less-used than some other parks in the system. Outside of occasional baseball teams which practice there, it doesn’t receive much traffic, they said.
“We’ve been looking to try to do this for a while and we finally got the money from the CDBG,” Parks Director Javier Mendez said, referring to the federal Community Development Block Grant program.
