"We didn't move here to have a big park in our backyard."
That's Dr. Howard Goodman, a retired oncologist who lives on Timber Creek Way in the Regency at Avenir subdivision, describing the view he thought he'd bought. His backyard, like those of his neighbors on the street, looks out over the Loxahatchee Slough, 13,000 acres of open wetland that borders Avenir's eastern edge. Some of those lots, according to neighbor Suzanne Kline, carried a premium of $40,000 to more than $200,000 for their preserve-facing position.
This spring, Goodman and his neighbors learned the open acreage behind their homes has a name, a federal funding source, and a construction timeline attached to it. It's called the Gardens Nature Park and Trail, a 24-acre linear park the City of Palm Beach Gardens plans to build in the strip of land between their houses and the slough. What actually caught residents off guard wasn't the idea of a park. It was discovering how long the city had already been planning it.
A Plan Older Than the Houses
The Gardens Nature Park and Trail is the product of a development partnership the city struck with Avenir Holdings in May 2016, years before ground broke on the first home in Regency. The developer donated the 24 acres to the city as parkland in March 2019. According to the timeline the city posts on its own project page, a January 2024 public meeting covered grant funding from the federal Land and Water Conservation Fund, and a July 2024 survey went out to community homeowners' associations. A June 2025 meeting between city engineering staff and, in the city's words, "members of the Regency community," is also listed, though no specific date is attached to it.
Regency residents told Stet News they don't recall that survey and weren't aware of the earlier meetings. Part of the reason is simple sequencing. Many of the homeowners now living along Timber Creek Way hadn't closed on their houses yet when the earliest outreach happened. Kline, for one, bought her home in January 2024, the same month the city's grant meeting is dated on its own timeline.
By the time the plan became visible to the people who'd actually be looking at it every morning, it had already cleared nearly a decade of internal process.
What the City Is Actually Building
The city held the first of three planned public meetings on May 21, with two sessions at Sandhill Crane Golf Club's second-floor ballroom. Dozens of residents showed up. According to the city's project materials, the finished park will include:
- An open-air nature education pavilion with a restroom
- An interpretive nature trail with signage on native plants and wildlife
- A butterfly and pollinator habitat
- Hiking trails that connect to the existing Avenir Conservation Area trail network
- A fishing pier
- Parking, landscaping, and security lighting and cameras
The city frames the project as one link in a much longer regional trail corridor, one that runs from the Loxahatchee Slough Natural Area and Grassy Waters Preserve south and east, north through the Dupuis Management Area toward Lake Okeechobee, and further north to Jonathan Dickinson State Park. Read that way, the park isn't primarily a backyard amenity for Regency. It's a connector piece in a public-lands system the city and county have been assembling for years, funded in part through the same National Park Service grant program that supports outdoor recreation land purchases nationwide.
That framing is accurate. It's also not what several of the closest neighbors say they were told to expect.
What Residents Are Actually Asking For
Kline's core objection isn't to green space. It's to what she says she was promised versus what's now on the drawing board. "I was told there were going to be butterfly gardens and simple hiking trails," she said, a description that undersells the security cameras, parking areas, and formal trailhead infrastructure now in the plan. Kline was severely injured during the 2024 tornadoes that hit the region, and her specific concern at the May meeting was accessibility: the distance between the park's planned amenities and its entrance, which she said could make the site difficult to navigate for anyone with mobility limitations.
Security came up repeatedly. Charoltte Presensky, the city's Leisure Services administrator, told residents the department heard those concerns clearly. "I think the people who are neighboring the park have the most concerns," she said, adding that the city's police force was present at the meeting and that staff would look at adjusting amenity placement based on what they heard. After the meeting, some residents said they left satisfied. Others said they didn't.
Wildlife became its own thread. Resident Cynthia Lynn reported seeing bald eagles perched at the edge of the slough near the proposed site and wrote to the city with her concerns. As of late June, her letter remained unanswered by the city. When Stet News asked directly, Benji Studt, outreach supervisor for the Palm Beach County Department of Environmental Resources, searched the area Lynn had described and said there's likely a nest nearby, but it sits outside the 500-foot buffer that would trigger additional review, so it's unlikely to affect the project.
Even neighbors who say they support the project in principle question how it was handled. "It is a good project, but the City Council didn't have any input. I think there is a way to make it more thoughtful," said Tinsley, another resident on the street. Several Timber Creek Way homeowners also say Toll Brothers, the builder behind Regency, told them the land behind their homes would never be developed. Toll Brothers did not respond to a request for comment on that claim.
What Happens Next
The city has committed to two additional community meetings before finalizing the design, with construction to follow afterward. As of the most recent public reporting, no revised site plan or firm construction start date had surfaced, and even Tinsley told Stet News in late June that what comes next is still unclear. The city's stated intent is to fold the accessibility, security, and placement feedback from the first meeting into a revised design before the next session.
The bigger pattern here isn't really about one subdivision. It's about how long a public land commitment can sit quietly inside city planning documents before it becomes visible from someone's kitchen window. The 2016 partnership between Palm Beach Gardens and Avenir Holdings predates the Publix planned for Avenir Town Center, predates most of the roughly 4,000 homes now built across the community's 4,760 acres, and predates the closings of nearly everyone currently objecting to it. The park was never a secret. It just wasn't loud, and the people now living closest to it are the ones discovering that the quiet version of a decade-old plan and the built version can look very different once the fencing and lighting show up on a rendering.
Two more meetings are still ahead. Anyone who lives near the Avenir Conservation Area and wants a say in where that fishing pier or that trailhead lands should plan to be at the next one.
If you're tracking how land near your own Palm Beach Gardens address gets used, protected, or repurposed over time, Jenna Fantauzzi keeps a close eye on exactly this kind of shift as part of ongoing homeowner support across the community. Let's Connect if you'd like a standing local read on what's changing near you.
