Young skaters battle for park> Proposal sparks controversy on location, design

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When Scott Loukes of Bangor went to summer camp in upstate New York two years ago, he went for all the traditional outdoor sports a teen-ager expects to find in a country retreat.

What he got was a lesson in how to grind down on rails, jump from ramps and glide on curbs. From New York City campers Loukes learned aggressive skating, the new extreme sport shown on ESPN-TV and held in the X-Games. When he returned to Maine Loukes, who had been in-line skating with his friends for several years, taught his buddies how to fly.

“I recently saw a couple of [those campers] in skating movies [of competitions],” Loukes said. “I love sports. I would love to go pro. That’s what I’m in it for, to succeed. Everyone has the dream of going pro.”

Loukes and his friends from the William S. Cohen School, Jack Brookings and Adam Hess, had competed in sports from basketball to baseball. But aggressive skating called them to a deeper commitment.

It also left them dejected.

When they went to work on their new sport in paved parks and along sidewalks – in the same way they would practice free throws or soccer skills – they were chased away by police. Being an athlete suddenly meant being annoying.

So the three started a campaign. They sent letters to the Bangor City Council and the mayor looking for help in finding space to skate. It was all about the need to practice.

“There is a lot of the same discipline that goes into basketball or snowboarding in skating,” Hess said. “When you fall, you have to get right back up.”

The skaters used that very approach when their letters went unanswered.

“Adam Hess e-mailed one of the people at WLBZ-TV, Channel 2. One of them e-mailed him back and said, `Come in and give us your idea,’ ” Brookings said. “I think the news story opened up more people’s eyes. That’s what got us to the committee.”

Around the time the three skaters were lobbying for their right to skate, Gov. Angus King’s Communities for Children initiative, which called for improving the quality of life for children in communties, was being implemented. From King’s initiative, a committee in Bangor was born.

First a group was formed to find ways to help youth, then a smaller faction interested in developing a skate park developed. None of the members on the committee were skating enthusiasts, but they had seen the skaters on Channel 2 and wanted to help.

“None of us have kids who are skaters. We do have a vested interest in the well-being in the community,” said Peter Phair, a skating park committee member. “We want to improve the quality of life for kids. A skate park seemed doable, it seemed tangible. This was something we could immediately have in place within a year.”

For Phair, who works at Care Development, the skating park was a new frontier. For Loukes and company, the skating committee was a new world.

The three 15-year-olds have devoted two nights a month since September toward helping plan the skating park – with no guarantees. A fund-raising effort is under way to construct a park, but controversy swirls around its location, design and equipment.

Brookings, Hess and Loukes have no choice but to help.

“When we ask where we can go we always get the same answer, `Nowhere,’ ” Brookings said. “I’ve stopped asking. In a day, we’ll get kicked off 10, 11 places all in a few hours. Half the time we spend looking for a place instead of skating.”

Loukes said the growing numbers of skaters makes a park imperative. Hess estimates 90 students out of 605 at the Cohen School in-line skate. Brookings said it’s just beginning.

“It’s grown significantly,” Brookings said. “When I first started it was me and two or three of my friends. Now it’s everyone.”

If you build it

There are 30 million in-line skaters in America, according to the International In-line Skating Association in Kensington, Md. The association’s director, Gill Clark, said aggressive skaters make up about 10 percent of that total.

The growing, displaced breed of athletes is the reason cities around the country have raised funds to build skate parks.

In Maryland, Montgomery County is looking at a state-of-the-art skating park plan that would link one giant park with smaller ones. Clark said the elaborate park system is not being put in to satisfy a demand, but to provide for the latest trend.

“I think it’s a combination of two things: there is a demand and, if you build it, they will come,” Clark said. “That’s what Montgomery County does. Montgomery County is one of the wealthiest counties. We’re proud of developing good facilities.”

Because skating facilities are virtually non-existent in Maine, in-line skaters from as far away as Foxcroft and Ellsworth come to Bangor to find places to practice. Belfast Parks and Recreation Director Al Douglas said skaters travel even farther to use the small, makeshift skating park in Belfast.

But, unlike Montgomery County, Bangor doesn’t have money to spend.

Phair said the Bangor skate park committee struggled with what children should have and what they could afford. The skaters would prefer an indoor facility, but that would have blown up the price.

“Some made the argument we should go full-boat boogie, get as much as we can with the understanding that would take an enormous fund-raising effort,” Phair said. “Others said we should start small and work our way up. We kind of came up with a compromise, taking a look at what we have with available space.”

In the late fall, the skating committee hooked up with the Bangor Police Athletic League, which was planning to develop a teen center at Essex Street hill, which is about two miles from downtown Bangor. PAL was happy to incorporate a skate park into its plan and to absorb some of the cost. So the project appears in the works.

However, while many questions were solved when the committee joined PAL’s project, the union also created lingering questions. Now the three skaters wonder if their efforts have been worth it.

Far and away

Hooking up with PAL solved the problem of where to build the park. But is it the best place?

Phair said the committee still wonders how effective the park will be if it draws interest but children can’t get there.

“What impact will it have?,” Phair mused. “Kids need to find some way to get to Essex Street. We thought, why not put it at the new waterfront? That probably was ideal rather than realistic.”

Brookings believes the park will help the sport grow – but maybe not at the Essex Street site because skaters will have to find rides to get there. Loukes said PAL is creating the park more to help downtown businesses than to help the skaters.

“I think it will draw some kids, but not as much as the police think,” Loukes said. “Their main purpose is to get us out of wherever they don’t want us. All PAL wants to do is get us out of the way of the merchants.”

PAL park coordinator, Bangor police officer Paul White, said putting a park downtown was impossible because there was no available land.

Loukes said with the lure of Bangor’s more challenging city sites, skaters will continue to go downtown to practice “street skating,” a brand of aggressive skating.

White’s answer to that puts the skaters back where they started.

“They’ll lose their boards. Skating in the city is against city ordinance,” White said. “If they want a place to skate without any problems, the city bus runs out to the area. I don’t think it will be a problem. If they want to find a way out, they will.”

A more concrete problem the skaters point to is that the park planned now may be too small – or too small-time to draw interest.

Phair said the plan provides for a skating area covering 10,000 square feet with a tab of up to $40,000 providing for four to five types of ramps and jumps.

Loukes said the park’s lack of equipment will make it a sorry substitute for a professional park. He’s not alone.

Douglas, who is spearheading a drive for a new skating park in Belfast, said having enough equipment to satisfy skaters of all abilities is important.

On the other hand, Farmington spent three years building a park that covered 64,000 square feet and had rails, a half-pipe, a banked reservoir and difficult jumps, but it didn’t last.

Farmington Parks and Recreation Director Steve Shible said when skaters refused to wear protective gear and supervision proved too costly, the park had to go.

When told Bangor’s skate park would have police supervision, Shible wasn’t any more hopeful it would succeed.

“You have to be real,” Shible said. “Kids don’t want cops looking over their shoulder. The police might ultimately be the thing that sinks it. It’s an authoritarian background. It’s great PR for the police.”

The Cohen School skaters said that’s the reason PAL is helping.

“We’re not sure about PAL. They’re more into it for the publicity than the skaters,” Hess said. “They’re more out to show they’re a part of it.”

Loukes said he has voiced his concerns about the location and low-end equipment, but his questions are going unanswered.

“PALS has pretty much taken over,” Loukes said. “It kind of made us mad. We started this. They had the same idea. Now it’s their operation.”

Image is everything

While Hess, Brookings and Loukes believe they have gained respect in gaining the skate park committee’s help, they still feel they are viewed as outcasts – making their crusade for a top-end park in Bangor more like the quest for the Holy Grail.

Loukes said skaters generally are stereotyped as bored, frustrated youths. He said a more recent TV news segment of the three skaters, done again by Channel 2, reinforced that negative image.

“If people were learning toward us, it changed their mind about us,” Loukes said. “Just the way it sounded, that we lived on the streets or wherever, that we chose to skate instead of doing school activities, which is totally not true. We’re all good students and we all play sports.”

The manager at Gunn’s Sports Shop in Bangor, Matt “Duffy” Spooner, is skeptical of the park’s chances for success. But that’s because Spooner doesn’t think the committee will get the project through all the red tape, not because he believes a park is unnecessary.

Spooner said whenever he sells a pair of in-line skates, customers ask where they can skate. He can only name two places: Mt. Hope Cemetery in Bangor or the University of Maine bike path in Orono. Spooner said a skate park is long overdue.

“In the city, the whole position is, `No, you can’t skate here,’ but they don’t tell you where you can skate,” Spooner said. “Bangor still doesn’t have a place to skate.”

Brookings, who attended an aggressive skating camp in Pennsylvania last summer, said aggressive skating in Maine would take off if the park were allowed to grow with the sport. He said jumps, ramps and rails would need to be added to improve the park’s basic design.

“At first, I wasn’t so sure they’d come through. It was a good start and a good try,” Brookings said. “But now, definitely, it seems it will go through. We’ve done so much on it now. We’ve made it so far already.”