A skate park for Wilmore?

"Skate Away"

The Methodist Home Recreation Center in Charlotte, North Carolina, is a unique new park that is creating excitement.  What kind of park?  A Skate Park!  The 13-month old Charlotte facility is a testimonial to a city-owned skate park as it was relatively inexpensive to build and it's always in use.

Skateboarding, in-line skating, in-line hockey, and BMX bikes are not going away.  In fact, these are the fastest growing recreational interests in America.  This is a group of teenagers and young adults who we as recreational professionals and community leaders haven't addressed.  We're still very conservative here and some kids who skate have long hair, wear baggy clothes, and may even have tattoos, so we tend to see them as different.  But these aren't bad kids.

A skate park was constructed for about $30,000 in Charlotte and the city was able to raise about $40,000 in national and local corporate sponsorship by selling advertising space inside the park.

This is what makes the idea of a skate park viable here.  It meets the needs of teenagers and young adults and can be done very affordably.  In Sioux Falls, South Dakota, the city is converting a vacated tennis court into a skate park for less than $10,000.

Yes, insurance is an issue, but according to the National Recreation and Park Association, skateboarding has a lower percentage of reported injuries than soccer, baseball, and basketball.

All municipalities have the same problem.  There are kids skating where adults have told them not to, yet they don't provide them with a place where they are allowed to skate.  Many communities don't have an ordinance that prohibits skating on public streets and sidewalks, but they probably will.

By constructing a skate park, we would be giving young people a safe place to skate.  We would be taking them off the streets, out of parking lots and away from businesses, churches, and schools.  The goal behind this would be to allow kids to demonstrate their talents without being hounded because they don't have a facility to "do it in".

Perhaps this is an area that Wilmore should provide for our children, teens, young adults and, yes, the rest of us who still fall down at Champs.  What do you think?

Mayor Harold L. Rainwater