County parks employees add a bit of magic to Cam-plex Park

GILLETTE (WNE) — If you want to board the train to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, try looking in Cam-plex Park.

There’s a speed limit sign on Doubletree Lane, on the right as you turn from Saddlehorn Road. For years, all it said was “9.” It didn’t have any units of measurement or anything, just the number 9.

Lars Jones, parks supervisor, said that when he asked about the sign, he was told that it’d been there for quite a while and that it really wasn’t a speed limit sign, but rather a way to get people “to notice their speed,” since they are still in a park.

Last December, the parks staff was looking for a project to do, and they noticed that this sign wasn’t in great shape.

“It was so old and faded, starting to fall apart, so they just built a new one,” said Kevin Geer, parks superintendent.

But instead of just replacing it, Jones and his colleagues did something extra.

Jones said he’s a big Harry Potter fan, along with fellow parks employees Chamberlin Peper and Baran Lechner. His older sister got him into the books when he was a kid, and he watched the movies as they were coming out.

In the Harry Potter franchise, Platform Nine and Three-Quarters is where students would board the train to go to Hogwarts.

With the original sign having “9” on it, Jones said they thought it would be “pretty fun” to add a fraction to reference Harry Potter. Jones said Geer gave them the OK, and they screwed together some wood, cut the numbers into the sign, painted it and stained it.

They put up the sign just before Christmas. And even though they haven’t heard any feedback from fellow Harry Potter fans yet, they don’t mind.

“It’s something fun, something different in the parks,” Jones said.

This story was published on Jan. 9, 2026.