Chariots of Ire : Skateboarders Vow to Ignore Oceanside Ban

Down at the smooth stretch of pavement near the Oceanside pier, Tony Andrew cut a serpentine path on his skateboard one sunny day last week, his long blond hair trailing behind.

Rolling onto the concrete stage of an outdoor auditorium nestled against the seaside bluffs, Andrew sped without hesitation toward a sheer, 3-foot drop onto hard concrete below. Unwavering, the 16-year-old youth launched himself into the sky, board and all, landing with the self-assured aplomb of a Top Gun fighter pilot.

To Andrew and the other teen-agers who practice such feats of aerial derring-do, there has been no better place for skateboarding than the asphalt expanse around the Oceanside pier.

But no longer. The Oceanside City Council recently passed an ordinance outlawing skateboarding on the icy-smooth strips surrounding the newly refurbished pier. With the new law in effect as of Saturday, city officials have promised to issue citations to anyone caught atop a skateboard in the area.

“I think it’s stupid,” said Andrew, a Santa Barbara resident who makes frequent trips to Oceanside to visit his mother. “I need a place to ride my skateboard. It gets boring just sitting around talking to my mom.”

The ban represents still another setback for skateboarders in San Diego County, where aficionados have witnessed a steady erosion in recent years of good sites where they can practice their sport.

Just a month ago, a popular skateboarding park near the Del Mar Fairgrounds was shut down because of liability insurance problems. Meanwhile, officials in San Diego are taking steps to outlaw skateboards along Ocean Front Walk, a crowded, 12-foot-wide ribbon of concrete stretching from southern Mission Beach through Pacific Beach.

In Oceanside, the ban was prompted in part because of concern about the potential for accidents caused by skateboarders.

Although the new law also forbids bicycling and roller skating near the pier, officials have been most concerned because of the proliferation of skateboarders in the area. When a rider slips or wipes out, the errant skateboard can become a potentially dangerous projectile hurtling toward the unwary, officials note.

Some skateboarders have even dared to ride down the steep ramps leading from the pier, darting dangerously close to pedestrians. And with restoration work nearly completed on the pier, city leaders expect larger crowds in the area, creating just the recipe for potentially serious accidents.

Moreover, the skateboarders cause extensive damage to the newly refurbished grounds around the pier, said Glenn Prentice, Oceanside’s public services director. Among the many tricks performed by skateboarders are stunts that involve riding onto curbs, sliding along cement steps or banking off the walls of structures in the area, he said.

Prentice said city work crews have been forced to repaint the band shell that serves as a backdrop for the outdoor auditorium on three occasions this year because of scuffs and other damage inflicted by overzealous skateboarders. Many of the concrete curbs and planters in the area also bear fresh scars caused by the boards.

The problems reached a peak a few weeks ago when more than $3,000 damage was caused during one weekend when a skateboarding contest was held in the area, Prentice said.

“A lot of the skateboarders are fine. It’s a small minority who are blowing it,” Prentice said. “They’ll do just about everything, even to the point of banking their boards off of parked cars.”

Though police will be wielding their ticket books if anyone is caught skateboarding in the region around the pier, many enthusiasts insist that the new city law will not stop them from flocking to the popular spot.

“If they come by and tell us to leave, we’ll just go away for a while and then come back when the police have gone,” said Josh DeKoyer, 13.

Sean Arnold agreed. “I think a lot of people will continue to do it,” said the 11-year-old, who came outfitted in colorful baggy shorts and high-top leather tennis shoes. “I think even if they make out citations, there still will be people who come. And it will just be a bigger problem somewhere else.”

Indeed, with its broad square of smooth concrete and grandstand seats for the spectators, the beachfront stadium beside the pier is known throughout North County as a mecca for skateboarding, drawing dozens of riders at a time on sunny days.

“If they shut this down, there will literally be nowhere to skate,” said David Swayze, 15. “I don’t understand why they want to close it down. It’s not really dangerous and we’re not bothering anyone.”

Swayze, who spends about three hours a day practicing at the stadium, said he will be hard pressed to find a spot as good. Up until about a year ago, Swayze and his buddy, Frank Eaton, 14, practiced at a concrete drainage channel known as the Shell Bowl, but that site was closed.

“It just seems like there’s no place to ride anymore,” said Eaton, a Carlsbad High School sophomore.

Some parents agree. DeKoyer’s mother, Florence Johnson, said she is angered by the new law in Oceanside. “I think it stinks,” Johnson said. “These kids need something to do, and they’re really not hurting anything here.”

She stressed that youths like her son are far safer skateboarding in the closed confines of the beach stadium than out on the street, where they would have to deal with cars.

“They’re not going to get hit by a car here and they’re not going to hurt anybody here,” Johnson said. “If the city’s so upset about some scuffs on the band shell, why don’t they give the kids some paint and let them fix it.”

Prentice agreed that new sites for skateboarders should be found, noting that he and other city officials have initiated talks to determine if a skateboard park could be built in Oceanside, perhaps on city-owned parkland. But such a park may ultimately prove infeasible, he said, because of mounting costs for liability insurance.

City officials in San Diego say youths have created something of an impromptu skateboard park out of the just-completed $800,000 municipal park along the beachfront.

“With cement seats and a cement promenade, it wasn’t long before the skateboarders found it,” said Mike Haas, an aide to San Diego Councilman Mike Gotch, who represents the crowded shoreline between Mission Beach and Pacific Beach.

Haas said efforts to outlaw the use of skateboards in the park and along busy Ocean Front Walk have been sidetracked because city legal officials feel that state law does not allow the city to ban the boards along sidewalks. A new state law, however, is in the works that would give the city power to legislate against skateboards on sidewalks as of Jan. 1, he said.

Until then, however, city officials will simply have to live with it, Haas said.

“The park is being destroyed before our very eyes,” Haas said. “Skateboarders have chipped away the concrete. People are being intimidated by 20 to 30 riders at a time. And the park is so well-lighted, there are skateboarders out there until 2 to 3 o’clock in the morning.”

Prentice said the skateboarders in Oceanside, too, have proven to be difficult to deal with at times.

“My son’s a skateboarder, so I feel for these kids,” he said. “But lifeguards, maintenance people, the police, we’ve all warned them about what they’re doing. We tell them that they’ve created the problem themselves.

“With a lot of the hard-core people, as soon as you turn your back on them, they do what they want. I’m not saying all skateboarders are obnoxious or rude, but the few that are ruin it for the rest.”