District 14 park board representative Rudy Karimi wrote on his Facebook page Thursday night, “Brace yourself folks, winter is coming, and so is an important update about last year's critically acclaimed love-it-or-hate-it-but-you-can't-ignore-it council district 14 blockbuster: the Glencoe Skatepark.”
Karimi said that after several community town halls, lots of advocacy and weeks of thinking about what to do next, he and the Dallas Park and Recreation Department have decided to eliminate the Glencoe skate amenity from the recommendations proposed for the 2024 bond package. The skate park, costing about $500,000, was to sit on a 5,000–9,000-square-foot piece of land in Glencoe Park off Central Expressway, just south of Mockingbird Lane.
The money will still go toward funding a skate park, just not one in District 14, Karimi said. “While we may have failed in bringing a skate amenity to council district 14, we failed in the most daring and gutsy way – and that is the best way to fail if you ask me,” Karimi said in his Facebook post, referring to all the advocacy behind the proposed park. “The bright side is we followed the process, we listened to our constituents, produced a tremendous amount of advocacy (RADvocacy) for skateparks, and we are still pushing for three of them in the 2024 bond, which is absolutely unprecedented in any previous city bond. That is still a heck of a lot to be proud of.”
Karimi maintains that Dallas is in desperate need of more skate parks.
About every 10 years, Dallas’ Park and Recreation staff performs an analysis of its amenities. The last one, done about eight years ago, identified several gaps, including skate parks. Back then, there was only one skate park, and that's still the case today.
That skate park, at Lakeland Hills in District 7, will be revamped as part of the 2024 bond package. Another one proposed for Oak Cliff is included as well. There were about 1.2 million people in Dallas at the time of the last analysis in 2016. There should be one skate park for every 75,000 people, according to industry standards, Karimi said. That would mean the city should have closer to 18 skate parks today.
But Dallas isn’t alone. Other major Texas cities have also fallen behind on skate parks. Austin operates two public skate parks and Houston operates five. Meanwhile, San Antonio has 16 public skate parks.
While the city may need more skate parks, not everyone was onboard for the one at Glencoe Park. Last October, some residents were asking for more community input about the park. Teri Ervin, a resident in the area, said at the time that she was worried not enough neighbors knew about the proposed skate amenity. There were also concerns about losing green space in the neighborhood, along with increased car and pedestrian traffic.“When the folks closest to the park come out and I want to say 80% are opposed, you have to listen to that.” – Rudy Karimi, Dallas Park and Recreation Board
tweet this
The city is still considering how it wants to move forward with its $1.1 billion 2024 bond package.
The community bond task force initially allocated nearly $350 million for parks and recreation in its recommendation. City staff reduced it to $225 million in December. Last week, city staff released a revised recommendation, which would allocate $250 million to parks. City staff have been working with council members on the latest recommendation.
Dallas City Council will consider the allocations in the 2024 bond package during a special called meeting this Friday. The allocations could change greatly between now and the time the bond is actually adopted, but Karimi is confident there will be about $2.5 million for Dallas skate parks in the bond no matter what.
Karimi told the Observer Tuesday that the idea for the skate park came about well over a year ago, but skaters have been advocating for a park in the district for well over 10 years. “The best opportunity was now in the 2024 bond,” Karimi said.
In late 2022 Karimi started to sit down with skate park advocates, many of whom live in his district, to brainstorm ideas for another park in Dallas.
The main points of opposition cropped up during the townhall meetings about the 2024 bond package. Some wondered why Karimi didn’t come to them sooner about the proposed skate park at Glencoe. However, he said the town hall meetings were the start of the discussion with the broader community about the park. The opposition wasn’t unexpected though. “I knew this would be a hot topic, but we still had a duty to perform and that was to carry forward the advocacy of the skate community who we had been speaking with for years,” Karimi said.
So, why not move forward with the proposed park despite the opposition? “When the folks closest to the park come out, and I want to say 80% are opposed, you have to listen to that,” Karimi said. “I don’t think it’s documented anywhere in the city or particularly in the park department that folks who live closer to a particular thing have the loudest voice, but it’s just common sense. Those are the folks that are walking their dogs there every day or throwing a Frisbee there every day, and not just the folks who may come in from across town to enjoy a skate park.
“So, when you start seeing just a massive amount of those folks just oppose this amenity, I mean the right thing to do is say, ‘Hey, look, while on paper this might be a great suggestion for Glencoe, in reality, it’s not going to fly.'”
That’s why the park got nixed. But Karimi wasn’t done with the proposed $500,000 skate park. “I went to Park Director John Jenkins and said, ‘Listen, I don’t want this to just go into thin air, this $500,000,’” Karimi said.
While there aren’t any formal plans for the location of a new skate park, Karimi hopes it will end up in District 2’s Samuell-Grand Park. “My goal for them [park staff] is to keep it in East Dallas because we need something here,” he said.
He said a skate park at Samuell-Grand Park might be more digestible because it would be farther away from people’s homes. “So, a lot of those concerns that folks had potentially living by a skate park don’t exist at Samuell-Grand because Samuell-Grand is just such a massive park,” Karimi said.
Karma said that this isn’t an official recommendation by the Park and Recreation Department, but just an ideal place for a skate park.
Even if the city decided to move forward with the Glencoe skate park, it still could have been killed down the road through public input. “It’s during that [public input] phase where just as many folks could come out and say ‘We don’t want this,’” Karimi explained. “At that point, who knows what would happen to that $500,000. It could go somewhere else. It could most likely not go toward a skate park at all. … That would be the biggest loss to the skate community. We’ve wasted everyone’s time, we potentially wasted some money and a big opportunity.”
The future may look brighter for skate parks in Dallas in general, but Karimi isn’t confident about their future in District 14. “A lot of my parks in council district 14, they’re not large. Glencoe is one of the biggest parks we have to offer in council district 14,” he said. “The folks in and around Glencoe, they kind of laid the blueprint that this isn’t acceptable in neighborhood parks, and remember, all of my parks in council district 14 are all classified as neighborhood parks.
“If we were to shift it to another Council District 14 park, it’s very easy for those residents to come up and say ‘Hey look, it didn’t fly at Glencoe for X number of valid reasons. It’s not going to fly here for the same reasons.’”
For skate parks, Karimi is looking for the path of least resistance. That isn’t in District 14. “But in all of this, I want to stress to everyone, we fostered and grew a tremendous amount of advocacy for skate parks,” he said. “I mean, when we put this out there citywide, whether it was on social media or wherever, people supported skate parks. They want skate parks. They know that the city needs more. It’s really just up to us to find the most suitable place for them now.”
