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Physical and mental health benefits. An escape from social media. An opportunity to connect with peers. A low-cost and equitable playing field for athletic aspirations.
These were just some of the merits cited by dozens of skaters and supporters who turned out to the most recent Danville Town Council meeting to call on the dais to move forward with the development of a skate park in town.
“With the addition of skateboarding in the Olympics, this sport can no longer be dismissed as simply a hobby without interest,” San Ramon Valley High School student Kate Jones said in a public comment at the Nov. 19 council meeting.
“After gauging teenagers’ interest for years, skateboarding finally has a platform for athletes to compete and perform competitively, on par with basketball, baseball, soccer, and many other Olympic sports. And with the same health benefits and competition opportunities, skateboarders deserve what so many other athletes already have – a place to practice and perfect their craft,” Jones added.
While skateboarding as a whole has proliferated in recent years, including with its debut in the 2020 Summer Olympics, and expanded from its urban roots to find increasing popularity in suburban areas such as the Tri-Valley, Jones and other speakers at last month’s council meeting pointed to the continued lack of a dedicated skate park in Danville – despite the town having made moves previously for a facility that had been set to open this winter.
Town Manager Joe Calabrigo told DanvilleSanRamon in a subsequent interview that a skate park had previously been approved by the council as part of a renovation that included replacing the play structure at Diablo Vista Park in the eastern portion of town.
Approximately two years ago, he said town staff advised the council that there could be “some economy of scale” in combining both the children’s play area renovation and the new skate park into a single project, and that doing so might lead to better outcome in the bidding process.
“Fast forward to earlier this year in the spring, we went out to bid on the project, and in June we got the bids back, and unfortunately we only received two bids, and there was a considerable disparity between the two bids,” Calabrigo said. “Then to top it off, each of the two bidders lodged bid protests with the town alleging that the other contractor’s bid wasn’t responsive, and there were some issues and concerns raised in the way that the specifications were written, partly as it has to do with the skate park.”
Those two contractors were Livermore-based GradeTech with a bid of $2,921,950.55, and Martinez-based MVP Construction with a bid of $4,788,102, with the town’s engineering department estimating the cost of the project at $3.35 million.
At its July 2 meeting, the Town Council reviewed the two bids and respective protests, with staff recommending that GradeTech be awarded the contract due to its lower cost and both protests dismissed. Following correspondence received from both contractors and a review of the bid protests, the Town Council moved to pull the approval of the contract with GradeTech from the consent agenda for further discussion, ultimately voting that night to reject both contracts.
The move came after MVP co-owner Mike Vila reiterated numerous points that were outlined in MVP’s protest against GradeTech’s bid, including allegations of bid-shopping, the use of unqualified subcontractors and other compliance issues.
From there, Calabrigo said the project was effectively rebooted, with staff returning to the council at a subsequent study session and officials electing to split the skate park and the playground renovation into two projects given the difficulties faced in the previous bidding process, particularly in regards to the skate park.
The specifications and plans for both projects were then revised “so that the next time that we do this, we can bid them separately and hopefully avoid some of the confusion that resulted the last time,” Calabrigo said. Staff returned to the council in September to provide a cost estimate for that move, and told the council at that point that they would be back for further discussions in December or January.
While the skate park was not on the Nov. 19 Town Council agenda – making the turnout of supporters during the non-agendized public comment portion of the meeting all the more striking – Calabrigo said that he suspected the community might have caught wind of plans for the topic to return to the council at a Dec. 10 study session, with Nov. 19 being the final regular meeting scheduled prior to that.
In addition to pointing to the steadily increased popularity and prominence of skateboarding and the opportunities the sport presents, supporters of the skate park that evening pointed to a wide range of benefits underscoring their support for the park and calling on the council to take action.
“I’m sure we’re all aware in the digital age, you know a lot of people, the youth especially, spend way too much time on our phones and on social media such as Tik-Tok and Instagram, and a lot of us end up comparing ourselves to a lot of fake online personas, which results in a lot of mental illness such as depression and anxiety,” SRVHS student Darren Zagrean said.
“I really believe that opening up a skate park will help combat this,” Zagrean added. “It would allow the youth to come and get a place they can use in Danville to decompress, socialize with their peers and exercise, and in doing so combat these mental illnesses.”
Todd Trowbridge, a Danville resident and pediatric occupational therapist, echoed this analysis of the growing detriments of excessive screen time for young people and the benefits of outdoor recreation such as skateboarding.
“I’ve been in practice for 25 years, and I’ve treated a lot of young adults and children with depression and anxiety,” Trowbridge said. “Most notably, in the past four years I’m getting a bumper crop. So I really appreciate the town of Danville spearheading an effort to give adolescents and children an opportunity to get what they need from a context that will support their learning, whether it’s sensory or motor learning or behavioral, or gross motor skills, psychological, and of course sociological.”
“I also get a lot of parents that reach out to me to work on behaviors that are currently in the schools, and again, these children don’t have much opportunity to play at school,” he continued. “They go home and sit on the couch. So a skate park, I would completely endorse it as a licensed healthcare provider.”
Alamo resident Robin Lemmo pointed to the particularly valuable role skateboarding plays for foster youth as a means of recreation and socialization as well as convenient transportation.
“They are kind of a shadow of our community, but they use skateboards not only for recreation, they use it for transportation – it’s portable and they can take it from foster home to foster home and so on, and on average they move from foster home to foster home about six times during the course of their grade school, intermediate, and high school,” Lemmo said. “As far as skateboarding, it is one last things that I can think of that a foster kid does not have to pay to play.”
While the dozens of speakers at that evening’s meeting came from a range of generations and perspectives, the emphasis for all was on the potential benefits of a skate park for young people in town, and aimed at highlighting the current dearth of easily accessible social and recreational activities for children growing up in Danville.
“I moved here from Miami, Florida in 2020, and look, I appreciate all the good work you guys do, but I’m just going to be completely blunt here – my first thought when I moved here was this town is so boring,” SRVHS student Dylan Cyphert said. “I’m just being honest – for the children of this town, it’s boring. And that might not seem like a big deal – a couple of bored kids, grow up.”
“But what it does do is it makes our children unhappy, and when you have unhappy kids they want to leave,” Cyphert continued. “And this is something I hear from all of my friends – all the kids I talk to at school – ‘there’s nothing to do; I just want to get out, I’m so excited to go to college so I can get out of this town.’ If you want to keep this town progressing, if you want to keep it doing well for our future generations, you need to keep our children engaged, you need to keep our children happy, and this skate park is a step in the right direction towards that.”
With the council prevented from discussing non-agendized items by the Brown Act, further conversation beyond support for the skate park was limited at the recent meeting. However, Mayor Karen Stepper moved to ensure that the upcoming study session on the topic on Dec. 10 be recorded in order for the numerous students who will be in class at that time to be able to review the discussion.Â
Following the study session, Calabrigo said that he is hopeful that the process for getting the planned skate park off the ground would be a smoother one without the same challenges as the previous process.
“We are optimistic that any issues that were raised by prior bidders that had to do with plans and specifications, that those have been remedied,” Calabrigo said. “I’m also told by my professional engineering staff that this is a time of year that’s actually a pretty good time to go out to bid on projects, because contractors are trying to line up work for the spring. We think that we’ve done what we need to do to address those concerns.”
The challenge now, Calabrigo said, is whether both projects will be able to move forward with the funds currently appropriated for them, which are now split between the two.
“The concern is that we would really love to get one or more bids back that would put us in a position to move forward without considering appropriating a bunch more money,” Calabrigo said.
As it stands, Calabrigo said the earliest bidding might open would be after the new year.
