May 2012 - Parks & Recreation - 59

Parks & reCreatIon at Work

Skate Park Vandalism
Communities with closed skate parks look beyond quick ﬁxes
By Maureen hannan

S

ometimes you have to clean
up other people's messes. It's
a fact of life that park professionals understand all too
well. But municipal agencies
addressing skate park vandalism often
fi nd cleaning up that particular kind of
mess is a complicated endeavor.
Do a Google News search on " skate
park vandalism " any week or month of
the year, and pages of recent local reports
will appear: vulgar graffiti defacing concrete and equipment, thefts and damage
delaying park openings, and broken, unsafe ramps forcing closure. Communities
dealing with the problem often describe a
range of issues, from simple lack of funds
for necessary repairs to concerns that continued vandalism might just mean a wasted investment. The small town of Brainerd,
Minnesota, recently faced this dilemma
when it was forced to close its skate park.
Below, Brainerd parks director Tony Sailer shares his community's experience, as
well as the solutions he is trying through
cooperation with other municipal departments, local businesses, and the public.

Lessons Learned in Brainerd
Jaycees Skate Park in Brainerd closed in
March due to graffiti, theft, damage, and
vandals' destruction of safety signs. The
park, built in 2004, was the result of energetic youth engagement, the parks
and rec agency's recognition that skateboarders needed a dedicated space, and
a grant from KaBOOM! The youth who

56

Parks & Recreation M A Y

Jaycees skate Park in Brainerd, minnesota-after vandals defaced surfaces with
graﬃti and damaged equipment

originally advocated for the park left the
community years ago to go to college or
fi nd jobs-and those who use the skate
park now were young children when it
was built, Sailer says.
" Skateboarders tend to be individualistic, " Sailer observes. With team sports like
soccer " it's simple to enforce rules and penalize the kids who break them, " he says.
" It's harder to do with skate parks, but it's
still important for the town to teach that
rules must be followed if you want to play. "
In hindsight, the town now recognizes
some mistakes it made in planning Jaycees Park. First, Sailer says, " we located
the park in an isolated area because there

2 0 1 2 w w w . N R P A . O R G

was already a cement pad there. " It was
a decision that seemed at the time like a
cost-effective way to leverage the grant
money. Secondly, because the modular equipment can be moved around on
the cement pad, " the pad was getting
crushed and beat up-which makes for
serious liability issues. "

Researching and Reaching Out
Sailer decided to learn how other communities dealt with similar problems.
One nearby park director who closed
the town skate park to repair vandalized
equipment shared that he published an
announcement in the local paper warning

May 2012 - Parks & Recreation

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