Vinton skate park users left a Monday night meeting with the town council with some hope that they may get a temporary reprieve on the scheduled July 30 closing of the facility.

Council member Carolyn Fidler told the group filling council chambers that if volunteers to help police the vandal-plagued park could be assembled, she would propose a resolution at tonight’s council meeting to provisionally keep the park open.

The council voted in June to close the facility in Gearhart Park after hearing staff reports of graffiti, vandalism and evidence of sexual activity and illegal drugs at the site. There also was a report of “tags” indicating gang activity, Mayor Brad Grose said Monday.

More than a dozen speakers addressed the council members, most pleading to keep the park open — at least until a new venue can be found. They argued that skaters are not the ones causing the problems, but others who arrive after dark when the skaters have left the unlighted park.

Teenager Deon Morgan said, “We need to keep the skateboard park. You’re taking away our lives. … We will try to keep it clean, if you build a new one.”
Monday’s event was a public meeting on the issue, not an official meeting of the council, so no action could be taken.

Fidler’s proposal received some support from Grose, on the condition that the park and the monitoring group be reviewed monthly. Fidler said after the meeting that she probably would include that as a provision of her resolution.

Should that resolution pass, Grose said that he would likely appoint a committee to find a new, more easily monitored, spot for skating.

The skate park was built six years ago in Gearhart Park on the site of tennis courts that apparently had been abandoned because vandals consistently damaged them at the remote, out-of-view site.

A coalition of private citizens, businesses and government helped raise the money to build the skate park. Skaters and their parents raised $10,000 in just more than a month to qualify for a matching grant from Roanoke County’s parks and recreation department, which operates parks in Vinton.

But Town Councilman Billy Obenchain, who engaged in several heated exchanges with audience members as the meeting wore on, reminded the crowd that the town had to threaten to close the park only a couple of years after it opened because of similar problems.

At the time, he said, “people came out of the woodwork” to help repair and oversee the park, but interest eventually fell off, resulting in this latest problem.

He also admonished parents and skaters for not following the park’s rules on the use of safety equipment, including helmets and kneepads.

One nearby resident complained of loud noise, swearing and other nuisance behavior — including vandalism of cars in the neighborhood near the park. But the crowd overwhelmingly supported keeping some sort of skating facility open.

Grose reminded the crowd that the town had a responsibility to ensure that the skate facility was “safe, legal and family friendly.”

If the council does consider a resolution to extend the deadline, Grose said, “I consider that a temporary thing … until the committee members do their work. Don’t think of it as a permanent extension.”