The City of Denver chose Easter weekend to close down Civic Center Park and public areas around Lincoln Park for an indefinite period of time.
Loosely translated, city workers kicked the homeless out of the parks, which is the opposite of how Mayor Hancock’s office said they were going to manage the camps during the COVID-19 public health crisis.
We’ve yet to hear a peep out of the mayor’s office as to why there was a sudden change of plans. He pledged last month to clean homeless camps, not clear them.
The task of breaking the news was left to Parks and Rec.
“Due to public health and safety concerns, and in an effort to prevent large gatherings and ensure extreme physical distancing, the Denver Department of Public Health and Environment and Denver Parks and Recreation are closing Civic Center Park and surrounding areas effective immediately and until further notice,” says Cyndi Karvaski, communications director for Parks and Recreation. “This closure is intended as a preventative action to reduce the spread of transmission of COVID-19 in areas where interventions to implement physical distancing have not been effective.”
Granted, we can only presume the “public health and safety concerns” are the increasing number of homeless people who are camping there overnight. We aren’t seeing a lot of homeless people sporting those trendy face mask accessories that are now required.
But for all we know, parks and rec employees could have caught a father playing tee-ball with his daughter, and we’ll have no more of that in Colorado!
Meanwhile, we hear there’s still some room for another tent at a new homeless camp sprouting up outside of John Hickenlooper’s campaign office.
Homeless camp outside of John Hickenlooper’s Senate campaign office.