City waits to decide on skate park

Andrew Edwards

Skate park advocates will likely have to wait until next year to find

out if they will be allowed to move forward with plans to build a

skate park in Laguna Beach, City Manager Ken Frank said.

Frank said he does not believe he has enough authority to sign a

conditional-use permit submitted on Oct. 11 by the South Coast YMCA

that would have designated a 35,000 square-foot parcel of the Bark

Park to be the site of a new a skate park. He would need explicit

approval from the City Council to sign the permit, and does not

expect the council will even be able to discuss the park until

January.

“There are clearly some pros and cons with the various sites, and

I’m not going to go out there and overrule the council,” Frank said.

The last time the council discussed the skate park was in May,

when the council gave the YMCA $15,000 to fund park plans and ordered

city staffers to get in touch with Caltrans to determine whether

traffic safety would be better at the Bark Park or Big Bend. Caltrans

reported that the Bark Park was the safer location, but the idea is

opposed by some dog lovers, who worry about losing a chunk of the

park.

“Dogs don’t have that many places to go as it is,” dog owner Rick

Oliver said as he played with his cattle dog, Ollie, at the Bark

Park. “Dogs need to be able to run some.”

In May, two members of the council, Mayor Cheryl Kinsman and

Elizabeth Pearson voted against giving money to the YMCA to plan for

a park at the dog park, and Kinsman declared she would never support

a park there.

The YMCA has at least one supporter on the current council, Wayne

Baglin said he favors building a skate park at the Bark Park.

He said access to the area is safe and that there is enough

acreage for both facilities.

The ongoing story of the skate park proposal has been marked by a

series of delays and changes of plans. In 2000, the proposed site for

the skate park was the Act V parking lot, but that plan was abandoned

to preserve parking. The Bark Park was selected as a second choice

with a switch to Big Bend in 2003. When Big Bend was rejected in May,

the Bark Park returned as the presumptive skate park site, and the

YMCA, which lacks a permit to build, already has a contract with the

city to use that land.

The longer it takes to move forward with a skate park, the longer

Laguna’s young shredders go without a safe place to skate, South

Coast YMCA chairman Larry Nokes said.

“There are 12-year-olds and they’re going down these steep hills,

and they’re taking these risks, because they can’t get to any distant

parks,” he said.

All the YMCA can do for now, Nokes said, is to sit back until the

council takes the next step.

“We’ll just have to wait and see.”