Oviedo senior program has been nearly three years in the making

Nearly three years since it was set to open, Oviedo’s Riverside Park is finally functioning as planned.

The park’s senior programs, which were originally slated to open on Oct. 1, 2022, had been indefinitely put on hold until finally beginning this month, in addition to other community activities and events taking place at the newly renovated community center. 

Hurricane Ian struck Oviedo on Sept. 29, unleashing 15 inches of rain within 24 hours and causing severe damage to Riverside’s park and pool and flooding the main building sitting at the center that was set to hold senior and other community programs.

“It was just devastation like we’ve never seen,” Oviedo City Manager Bryan Cobb said in December 2022.

The devastation included the interior of the community center building, taking on 25 inches of water, destroying anything sitting below the waterline, including equipment, wall partitions and the system that runs and cleans the pool. 

The pool itself “became a swamp — we had an alligator move in at one point,” Recreation Program Supervisor Michael McGarvey, who oversees Riverside Park, said. “At one point, we were shoveling schools of dead fish out of the skate park, and there were fish that got stuck inside the building and died. 

The Riverside Park pool in Dec. 2022, about two months after Hurricane Ian (Photo by Eric Orvieto)

“We lost the ‘side’ part of Riverside, and just became the river park,” he said. “It was crazy in here.”

Park and building renovations totaled about $1.3 million, all of which came from insurance claims and funds from FEMA, Belden said.

“The city encountered a traumatic experience,” Oviedo Recreation and Parks Director Paul Belden said. “It was a lot of kudos to staff for embracing this, because all of our staff [at Riverside Park] were displaced to another facility during the time because they didn’t have a home to go to at Riverside Park.

“It was a great experience to see staff making Riverside their home again,” he said. 

McGarvey was promoted to his current position a month before Ian, and was displaced to the Oviedo Aquatic Center where he shared a small office with three others, with his “desk” being “a chair with an AV cart that I left my laptop on in the corner.”

“Things were geared up to go [before Ian], and then we flooded and I was [moved to the Aquatic Center] for two-and-a-half years,” he said. “It wasn’t fun.”

With the destruction of the interior of the community center building, McGarvey and his staff undertook its rebuild.

“I’ve never launched something from scratch like this, so this is learning how to deal with all the contractors, and the different instructors and all the different customers that come in and have their ideas of how things should go vs. what we can actually pull off practically,” he said.

The community center officially reopened to the public in March, Belden said, with certain areas, such as the racquetball courts, opening shortly afterward.

“Once we finally moved staff back into the facility, they hit the ground running again on reviewing programs and the formation of all the activities that we were working on for some time,” Belden said. 

The senior programming officially began on June 2 with what McGarvey called a “soft launch,” offering both indoor and outdoor activities such as yoga, art, tai chi, tennis, swimming and water aerobics, game time, pickleball and racquetball between 8 a.m. and 1 p.m. on weekdays. The indoor community center programs run Monday through Thursday, while Fridays only offer outdoor programs. 

In addition to senior programs, the park already offers programs to non-seniors, including tennis lessons, a chess club, a twirling class, a homeschool PE program, a fencing program, Zumba and an activity program for special needs adults. McGarvey hopes to add even more options for community members, such as yoga and esports (multiplayer video game competitions), in the future.

“I want to make sure we’re not stuck in a box of just one specific group,” McGarvey said. “We want to be able to serve everybody.”

The park is also a new option outside of the Aquatic Center for residents to go to to sign up for city programs, events and classes, Belden said. 

The full-time staff of six at Riverside is working on having an official grand opening in the coming weeks, possibly timing it with the 35th anniversary of the park’s opening in July, McGarvey said. 

“We’re not a huge staff,” McGarvey said. “So it’s a lot of everybody doing everything, so everyone has to team up and power through and make stuff happen.”

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