Manhattan Beach will get its first skate park by the end of the year, the City Council decided Tuesday night.
The council chose Marine Avenue Park as the location and will apply for a $300,000 grant to cover the cost. The grant, which is through Supervisor Don Knabe’s office, stipulates that the project must be completed in 2016.
Specific design details will be approved by the council at a later date.
“Not every kid plays football, baseball or basketball,” said Councilmember Amy Howorth, who has long advocated for a skatepark. “We need a place for everybody to hang out and practice the sport they want to practice.”
The decision comes after over 15 years of attempts to build a skatepark in the city.
Most recently, the council hired a consultant, Kanten Russell of Stantec, to determine if the community wanted or would tolerate a skatepark, and if so, where it should go, what it might look like and how it would be paid for.
An earlier proposal to build a skatepark in Polliwog Park was met with a fierce backlash from nearby residents and led to the formation of the Friends of Polliwog Park group, which successfully fought off the attempt.
When hiring Russell, the council dictated that Polliwog Park would be removed from consideration.
Russell led a series of public meetings at which he presented possible locations and designs and asked for feedback. He also analyzed the results of a survey on the city’s website. He concluded that the community would support a small skatepark if it wasn’t paid for with city money.
“Manhattan Beach is just not ready for anything bigger,” he said at the August meeting. “To try to do something any bigger—it’s never going to happen.”
Then at the last meeting in September, the locations were narrowed down to Marine Avenue Park and Manhattan Heights Park. Russell said he thought a business would probably sponsor the park’s construction.
However, staff presented the grant opportunity at the January 19 meeting for council to consider. Parks and Recreation Director Mark Leyman said the city had a “very good” chance of getting the grant.
“It’s not a large scale project, so it could easily be done within a year,” said Leyman.
At the meeting, Russell presented four options for the council to consider. They included two locations within Manhattan Heights Park, one next to the basketball courts and one in front of the building off Manhattan Beach Boulevard, and two different design options for a corner of Marine Avenue Park across from Manhattan Beach Studios, one of which was 2,000 square feet and another which was 5,000. Staff ultimately recommended the site in Marine Avenue Park, which currently has underused exercise equipment which would have to be removed.
A representative from the studios said that they didn’t mind having a skatepark nearby, but requested that a fence be built, citing a recent break-in.
Next the city will need to hire another consultant to create a specific design since it stipulated that the same company which determined whether the city should build a skatepark couldn’t also get the contract to do so. ER
