Last week we spoke with City Attorney briefly by phone. He was able to confirm that he had been in contact with ARC and had been looking over the details of the contract. Before he is able to update us, he must first meet with other City officials but he did say he expects to have some definitive information for us this week!

It was also discovered last week that the Capital Improvement Plan (CIP), written a year ago, outlines something interesting, namely, that Parks and Rec was well aware of the skateboard community's preference of a concrete skatepark, which they discussed at length in the CIP. The problem they mistakenly identified with a concrete park, was the cost of it; however, we know now that concrete options are very much within our budget. The reason for Parks and Rec's misunderstanding of the cost of a concrete park was on account of only discussing the topic with American Ramp Company. This is all an important piece to the overall story, because many people including City Council members and the leadership at Parks and Rec have implied or directly stated that the skateboard community missed some ambiguous opportunity to provide input about what kind of a skatepark we wanted, but that idea is demonstrably false and furthermore, the City and Parks and Rec already knew what our input would be, but mistakenly thought it impossible to provide us with such a park because they were not aware of the feasibility of one at the time. We believe they are aware of that now. 

In other news, Blue Summit Pictures has continued work on their short documentary on the subject of this skatepark. 

The Citizen also did an article on the issue after our attendance at City Council where we spoke during the public comment portion. The article can be found below. 

https://hburgcitizen.com/2023/04/26/city-officially-pauses-skate-park-renovations-amid-criticism/

We hope to have some more substantial news soon, so stay tuned. We hope to quickly begin pursuing a new plan with Parks and Rec and the City, but this will take everyone agreeing to breach the current contract and begin seeking new designs/quotes/concepts. If are not able to resolve our differences with Parks and Rec and the City, then we may have to continue floating the issue into relevance at meetings and with the media. This tactic will help us to all look deeper into the issue until we can all agree the best course of action remains constructing a new skatepark where the old one once was, using concrete as the primary material. 

Thanks again for keeping this issue relevant with us! Talk to your friends about it. We need all the support we can get and there's a lot of misinformation out there about this so it is important to let people know the details and facts as we know them to be!