Skateboard supporters oppose plan to move park
An advocate for the Westside Skateboard Park Society is disappointed with the City of West Kelowna’s proposal to move the West Kelowna skateboard park.
“Everyone’s pretty upset about it,” said Mason Barzilay of the Westside Skateboard Park Society. “This skateboard park hasn’t been around for a long time.”
Barzilay lobbied for more than a year for the replacement skateboard park, which opened in July 2016, including presenting to West Kelowna council, personally fundraising and writing a significant submission for the Canada 150 grant that went toward the skateboard park as well as the Annette Beaudreau Amphitheatre in Memorial Park.
The city is now proposing to move the park from its place behind the Johnson-Bentley pool to make room for a new City Hall.
City officials want to shift the skateboard park from northwest of the Johnson-Bentley swimming pool to a location on the building's southeast side. The proposed 1.2-acre site is within the Agricultural Land Reserve, and next to a settling pond used as part of an early sewage treatment system,
“For most of us it does feel a bit like a slight and I don't know how the citizens of West Kelowna feel as a whole about the city wasting taxpayers’ money building facilities and then shortly after tearing them down,” said Barzilay. “I don’t feel this is a good use of government resources.”
Barzilay calls the skateboard park the best in the Okanagan.
“People come out from across B.C. and across Canada because we did create something that’s worldclass,” she said.
The bowls in particular, Barzilay said, are unique and some of the best.
“People are really passionate about this park,” she said, adding skateboarders shovel the park in the winter to use it.
The park provides countless teens as well as adults with access to free physical activity.
The park cost nearly half a million dollars to build five years ago
“The fact that the city has decided that after a couple of years they're going to possibly throw hard-earned taxpayer dollars down the drain to build something else is very disappointing, especially when there's not a lot of things for kids to do on the Westside, “said Barzilay.
The City of West Kelowna advised the Westside Skateboard Park Society in January the park was within the general area of the new city hall and they would be doing further analysis to determine if there