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North Shore Deserves a Good Skate Park
By:
Wade Morisato (Hawai'i Skatepark Association)
June 23, 2007
The North Shore of O'ahu, the mecca of surfing every winter,
world-class surf breaks crammed into a 7 mile stretch of reef that starts at Haleiwa and ends with V-land. Almost right smack dab in the middle of this legendary stretch of coastline is the Banzai Pipeline. Big waves and big barrels, explode just yards from the beach, makes Pipeline one of the most exciting surfing arenas in the world not only for surfers, but spectators alike.
Since 1976, the North Shore community has been trying to get a public skatepark built in their backyard to complement the activity going on in the ocean, with something just as exciting happening on land. For the first 25 of the 31 years, the North Shore community would get repetedly denied in their requests to have the City and County of Honolulu build a public skateboard facility. Then in the early part of the millenium, the island of O'ahu was experiencing a skatepark boom. Unfortunately the parks that were being built, were being designed and constructed by companies that knew nothing about the skatepark building process, and the final products were sub-par at best. Once again, a skatepark project on the North Shore would go on the books, design and construction money would be allocated, and with its fate predetermined, history was destined to once again repeat itself. But a small group of local skaters had other plans and pushed the City to finally get it done, and get it done right. Fed-up with the substandard parks that were popping up around the island, the group of local skaters, knew that they had to bring in a the best skatepark builders in the world to build something that could complement the best waves in the world. So in December of 2002, Dreamland Skateparks was awarded the design/build project as a subcontrator working with a local company PER, Inc. Dreamland submitted a design that was approved by the City and County of Honolulu and was told by PER, Inc. to wait for word on when to come out to build the park. The contract stated that the park would have to be completed by the fall of 2003. That day came and went as PER, Inc. would continue to stall the project.
Over the next several years Dreamland Skateparks would get told countless times to leave a couple of months out of the year open to come out and build. That day never came until finally without any notice whatsoever to Dreamland Skateparks, PER, Inc. took it upon themselves to cancel their contract with Dreamland, and go forward with a second rate skatepark builder from California. What makes this whole fiasco even worse is that the City & County of Honolulu is in support of what PER, Inc. has, and is doing to not only the citizens of the North Shore community, but to every single person who has ever paid a penny in tax money here in Hawai'i (and that includes all you traveling surfers who drop a lot of money during the winter months).
On June 21, 2007 we held a peaceful protest at the site of the Banzai Rock skatepark, and things almost got out of hand. Check out the news coverage on www.50-50.com. We just want to build awareness and support so that this park can get completed the way the City & County of Honolulu and PER, Inc. was supposed to do it in the first place.
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