Seattle Sun Newspaper - Vol. 8, Issue 6, June 2004

Copyright 2004 Seattle Sun. Please feel free to use the article below in your research. Be sure to cite the Seattle Sun as your source.

New Ballard park to include skatebowl

By JAMES BUSH

It wasn't a great day for a victory celebration.

The scheduled "Learn To Skate Day" event at the Ballard Bowl on Saturday, May 22, appeared to be rained out, but not if Dan Hughes had anything to say about it. With the help of a giant tarp provided by Hughes, many yards of yellow rope, and a diligent group of skateboarders wielding long-handled brooms and squeegees to clear standing water off the temporary roof, the Ballard Bowl was back in business.

That was also the word from City Hall, as just one day earlier, Seattle Parks Department Superintendent Ken Bounds endorsed a compromise plan to include a relocated skatebowl in the plan for the future Ballard Civic Center Park at 22nd Avenue Northwest and Northwest 57th Street.

Built two years ago as a temporary facility, the skatebowl, which resembles an empty swimming pool, has developed a devoted following. But it sits on a piece of public property that the neighborhood plan for the central Ballard area envisioned as the site of a tree-lined passive park.

Bounds' decision follows six months of meetings, hearings, and recommendations, during which parks planners first embraced the skatebowl, then rejected it, then embraced it again. Credit that final U-turn to Mayor Greg Nickels, who publicly backed retaining the Ballard Bowl, and the Seattle Parks Board, whose May 13 recommendation to create a new skatebowl on the site was endorsed by Bounds.

The prospect that the bowl will be demolished makes this a bittersweet victory for the skaters. "I'm happy that they agreed to have a bowl," says Hughes, a member of the Puget Sound Skatepark Association, a group organized around efforts to preserve the bowl. But he questions the city proposal to demolish the existing structure and build a new one nearby. Hughes argues that he's seen no evidence showing that the skatebowl, built with the help of a pair of grants from the Seattle Neighborhood Matching fund, isn't structurally sound.

Jason Harrison, another Puget Sound Skatepark Association organizer, agrees. "They want to demolish this bowl and build a new bowl five feet away," he says. "It just seems like a waste of time and taxpayer money."

One reason the bowl remains threatened is its location. It is tucked into the southwest corner of the future park, immediately adjacent to the Ballard QFC grocery store. Security Properties, a Seattle real estate development company, has proposed replacing the existing store with a mixed-use structure with a 45,000 square foot grocery store on its ground floor and some 250 apartments above. About 40 of those apartments would be allowed courtesy of a zoning provision (again created by the central Ballard plan), which grants the developer extra building height in return for building townhouses along the park edge. Potential townhouse purchasers may not include a front-yard skatepark under the heading of "amenities."

Jeanne Muir, a Fremont public relations consultant hired to represent Security Properties, says the current location of the skatebowl "provides some challenges. We just think it should mutual: we should be good neighbors to the park and the park should be a good neighbor to us."

According to Bounds' public statement, the relocated skatebowl will be "east of the park's center and not as close to the property line as the existing bowl."

Of course, the preferred skatebowl site for some Ballard residents is "somewhere else." Beth Williamson Miller is executive director of the Ballard Chamber of Commerce and the unofficial spokesperson for those who would prefer to see the skatebowl dropped from the park design. She says Bounds' decision was probably inevitable, given Nickels' public endorsement of the bowl. "I don't think it's particularly a surprise, based on the fact that Ken Bounds works for the mayor," she says.

The decision is a disappointment, says Miller, for both the citizens who worked on the neighborhood plan, and for voters who supported the 2000 Pro Parks Levy (which included a skatebowl-less Ballard Civic Center Park among its offerings). In a letter to the parks board, Stephen Lundgren, a participant in the neighborhood planing effort, described the proposed park as having "a succinct description and a defined budget." Adding a new skatebowl could add up to $250,000 in costs to the $2.47 million project, he notes.

In his statement, Bounds said he would seek extra money from the Pro Parks Levy's contingency fund to fund construction of the new skatebowl.

In the meantime, observers can only marvel at the tenacity, ingenuity and media-savvy exhibited by the skateboard community in saving the single city-owned skatepark. In addition to packing every meeting on the issue, the Puget Sound Skatepark Association has organized events, given tours of the facility to officeholders, held a downtown rally, and gotten the issue significant coverage in both print media and on television. A group called Parents for the Ballard Bowl (organized by Kate Martin, Scott Shinn and Patrick Wickline) created an alternative park plan that proved influential in the Parks Board's deliberations. In response, the City has not only drafted an official skatepark policy, but is investigating possible skatepark sites in several neighborhoods.

"It shows that we can make a difference," says Harrison.