In this week’s news section, I’ve got a short piece on a project at the Peninsula Park Rose Garden. Rejuvenation Inc and the Neil Kelly family donated $50,000, and the Parks department wants to put it toward making the rose garden handicap accessible.

That’s all well and good, but the neighborhood association is feeling blindsided by the project—and they’re frustrated by what Parks is telling them, that the project’s got to get started by October, so the donors can announce it at a company picnic.

I just spoke with Jim Kelly, owner and founder of Rejuvenation, who wants to correct the record: He and his brother have put no pressure on Parks to speed the project. Moreover, when they first approached Parks, they wanted to make sure the neighborhood would be involved.

What happened in this case is we approached the Parks department about making a donation. They presented us with four different [project] possiblities.

We told them we want to do that [Rose Garden] project, we asked what their schedule would be, they said they’d be able to do the work in the fall.

So we said oh good, maybe we want to have our company picnic then, and have that as our kickoff.

Kelly stresses that the picnic was planned after Parks laid out the schedule. There was “no pressure, no nothing” from his family. (Parks staff, meanwhile, has been describing the process as having been driven by the donors’ timeline.)

Now, he says, he’s grumpy that what was a “no strings” civic contribution is stirring up controversy. “We’re at the point where we’ve got a neighborhood association that has not given us any assurances that they’ll support going forward,” Kelly says. “We support the neighborhood having the appropriate input, but this [process] is not of our doing.”

Eek. Sounds like quite a mess over such a beautiful garden. (And I certainly haven’t helped, by focusing on the neighborhood-parks back and forth, without getting the Kelly’s side until now.)