CAPE CORAL, Fla. (WINK)\u2014Bocce ball players at Veterans Park say they feel left in the dark as the city works on a renovation project.<\/p>\n
The city says power’s out and restrooms are temporarily out of service as it puts in new basketball and tennis courts. The Italian-American Bocce League started its season, and members say they’re upset about the situation.<\/p>\n
They say the lack of lights creates a safety hazard. Normally they start playing at 6:30 p.m. and sometimes don’t wrap up until 10 p.m.<\/p>\n
They started at 5 p.m., and some league members couldn’t make it. One group member said it may seem like a trivial matter, but this is really important to them.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Several older folks say this is how they socialize, stay active and even find love. Now, they’re not sure when the lights will come back on and want answers.<\/p>\n
“It gives you something to do, and it’s exercise, and you know, camaraderie is a main, is a big, big thing when you get to be our age. So we love it, we love it,” Dorothy Trier said.<\/p>\n
“It’s pretty devastating. I mean, this is something they look forward to. It’s almost like their Monday night football. This is their Monday Night Football,” Joe Brown said.<\/p>\n
“It’s exercise. It’s comradeship, meeting people, good friends, good times, and getting out there instead of being retired,” Claire Heyward said.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
WINK News reached out to the city for answers on when this work could be completed. The city says it has been communicating with the league and pointed to an earlier press release.<\/p>\n
The release says the lights will be out as work continues and asks for patience. Right now, no date is set for completion.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"CAPE CORAL, Fla. (WINK)\u2014Bocce ball players at Veterans Park say they feel left in the dark as the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":400094,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[209,211,210,325,115],"class_list":["post-400093","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-cape-coral","tag-cape-coral","tag-cape-coral-headlines","tag-cape-coral-news","tag-lee","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/400093","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=400093"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/400093\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/400094"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=400093"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=400093"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=400093"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}