Lake Clarke Shores Is Rebuilding Three of Its Parks. The Boat Ramp Isn't One of Them.

More than 1,000 people showed up to Town Hall for the Lake Clarke Shores Community Barbecue this year, according to the landscape architecture firm the town brought in to help plan its parks. That is not a small number for a town this size. Lake Clarke Shores counted 3,564 residents in the 2020 Census, which means close to a third of the entire town turned out for one Saturday afternoon. This year's barbecue, held February 21 outside Town Hall, carried a tropical theme, with pulled pork, fried catfish, mechanical surfboards, and the antique car show that anchors the event every year.

It was also, without much fanfare, the moment the town's next round of park improvements got its first real data.

A landscape architecture firm called Cotleur & Hearing set up at that barbecue with business cards printed with a QR code, not a survey table or a sign-in sheet. The firm's own account of the day describes engaging with residents and handing out those cards to get people into an online survey on the spot, while the crowd was already there for something else entirely. That single event, according to the firm, became the starting point for a Parks Master Plan covering three specific sites: North Park, Memorial Park, and Pine Tree Park.

Two of the town's five public parks are not part of that plan. If you launch a kayak from Boat Ramp Park or play tennis at Town Hall Park, nothing about your routine is currently on the table.

The Plan Covers Three Parks. Two Aren't.

Lake Clarke Shores maintains five parks, all listed on the town's own parks and recreation page: Community Park, Boat Ramp Park, Memorial Park, Pine Tree Park, and Town Hall Park. The Master Plan survey, hosted on the town's site under the heading "Your Parks, Your Vision," names only North Park, Memorial Park, and Pine Tree Park as the subjects of the redesign.

Here's how that splits, based on what the town has published so far:

North Park is the one gap in this table worth flagging honestly. Unlike the other four, it doesn't have its own dedicated amenity page on the town's site yet, which suggests the planning process may be further along for Memorial and Pine Tree than it is for North.

What's Already Working at Memorial and Pine Tree

Before any redesign happens, it's worth being clear about what these two parks already do well, because a master plan doesn't start from nothing.

Memorial Park sits at the head of Lake Clarke itself, at the corner of Forest Hill Boulevard and Pine Tree Lane. Its walking trail is short by design, funded originally through the Florida Recreation Development Assistance Program along with Palm Beach County. It's also where the town runs its summer Fishing Camp, a weeklong program each July for kids ages 5 through 13 that teaches casting, fish identification, and water safety, and wraps with a small competition. This year's session ran back in July, and anyone who has registered a child for it likely has Yulibeth Orellana's name in their contacts, since she's the town's point of contact for the program.

Pine Tree Park, directly across Pine Tree Lane from Memorial, is built around something the town calls the Heart Trail, a shaded walking path with five separate exercise stations along the route. It's a smaller, quieter counterpart to Memorial's fountain and plaza, oriented more toward fitness than scenery.

Both parks are modest by the standards of a place like Okeeheelee County Park a few miles away, which runs to 1,700 acres. That's the point. These are neighborhood-scale amenities serving a neighborhood-scale town, and the master plan is being built around what residents actually do at them, not what a regional park could offer instead.

Why the Boat Ramp and the Butterfly Garden Aren't on the Table

Boat Ramp Park and Town Hall Park being left out of this particular planning cycle doesn't mean the town considers them finished or unimportant. It means that, for now, what's there is what's staying.

Boat Ramp Park is where Lake Clarke Shores residents access the lake for anything beyond their own dock: a 40-foot dock, a 150-square-foot floating dock, and a launch built for kayaks. Lake Clarke connects to the Intracoastal Waterway, so this small park functions as the town's actual point of entry to a much bigger network of water. If you fish for largemouth bass or common snook, or you paddle out most weekends, this is the piece of town infrastructure your routine depends on, and it isn't part of any pending redesign conversation.

Town Hall Park, at the municipal complex on Barbados Road, is arguably the town's most amenity-dense site: two tennis courts requiring an access card, a basketball court, an aquatic playground mister for hot afternoons, and a butterfly garden maze that doesn't show up at any of the other four parks. It was built and maintained in large part by town volunteers, alongside Florida Recreation Development Assistance Program funding. None of that is scoped into the current Master Plan either.

For residents who center their week around one of these two parks, that's useful information in itself. The uncertainty hanging over North, Memorial, and Pine Tree Park doesn't extend to the boat ramp or the tennis courts.

The Barbecue Did the Job a Public Hearing Usually Does

What stands out about how this process started isn't the survey itself. Online surveys for municipal planning are common enough. It's that the town's consulting firm chose the Annual Barbecue, of all the town's events, as the place to launch it, and that the choice paid off in scale that a mailed survey or a weeknight meeting at Town Hall almost never achieves.

Getting roughly a third of a town's population into one place on one afternoon is not something most municipalities can count on. Lake Clarke Shores can, because the barbecue is already the town's biggest annual draw, with the antique car show pulling in its own following independent of the food. Cotleur & Hearing's team, represented that day by McKenna West and Maegan Mikkelson, used that existing gravity rather than trying to create new gravity of their own.

It's a pattern that shows up elsewhere in how this town runs. Later each year, the Holidays in Paradise Parade takes over the streets, paired with the Jim and Judy Tackett Memorial Tree Lighting, named for a couple who were long known for their community involvement. These aren't just seasonal decorations. They're recurring, well-attended civic moments, and in a town this size, that kind of moment is apparently where planning conversations happen too.

Having a Say Before the Plan Is Final

The survey is still live on the town's website under the parks and recreation section, and Cotleur & Hearing has indicated the results will feed directly into park-specific design concepts for North, Memorial, and Pine Tree Park, along with broader guidelines for the town's approach to park design going forward. If you weren't at the barbecue in February, here's what still matters:

• The survey takes about five minutes and the town is asking for at least one response per household, though multiple household members are encouraged to respond separately.
• Feedback so far has come from residents who happened to be at Town Hall on one specific Saturday. If your priorities for Memorial or Pine Tree Park differ from what a crowded barbecue afternoon might surface, this is the direct way to add that.
• Boat Ramp Park and Town Hall Park aren't part of this survey's scope, so input on those two won't be captured through this particular process.

A small town making decisions about its five parks through a barbecue survey and a recurring holiday parade isn't a small or incidental detail. It's a fairly accurate description of how Lake Clarke Shores actually functions: decisions get made where people already are, not where a calendar says they should be.

If you're weighing what a lake-access town like this offers day to day, beyond the numbers you'd find on a listing sheet, this is the kind of texture worth knowing. The Don Moore Team works this stretch of Palm Beach County closely enough to track it, and we're glad to talk through what Lake Clarke Shores and its neighboring communities actually feel like to live in, whenever you're ready for that conversation.