Skate park nearly ready
By Ethan Smith
Published in News on November 20, 2015 1:46 PM
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News-Argus/ETHAN SMITH
Senior technician Antonio Torres, left, works with facility maintenance technician Charles Jacobs and temporary worker Clifton Braswell to lift and align a ramp before bolting it down at Goldsboro's new skate park on East Ash Street.
Goldsboro's highly anticipated first-ever skate park is nearing completion, and Parks and Recreation director Scott Barnard has said it will be open by the second week of December.
The skate park's hours will be from sunrise to sunset, and it will be free of charge to anyone looking to use the park.
It will be open to everyone, from skateboarders to cyclists to people on roller skates and people riding manual scooters, Barnard said.
Several maintenance crews with Parks and Recreation have been working on the park recently, and said there are only a few more ramps and rails to be installed before it is finished.
"Most of the equipment is already in place and we're just waiting on several pipes and rails to install," Barnard said. "Our goal is to have it open before Jingle in the Park."
The equipment already installed in the skate park was sanded down, painted and refurbished before it was installed.
Barnard said the crews assembling the skate park are the same men and women who cut grass and clean and maintain the Parks and Recreation facilities in the city.
"It's taking us a bit of finesse to get the equipment reassembled," Barnard said.
Parts for the skate park were bought by the city from Seymour Johnson Air Force Base roughly two years ago after the base declared the parts to be surplus.
The 96-by-60-foot pad, once completed, will provide all kinds of skaters with two quarter pipes, two grinding rails, a kicker ramp and a pyramid ramp to grind and ride on.
The process of getting a skate park in Goldsboro began in November 2014 when teenagers Josh Lancaster and Kevin Gillespe began collecting signatures on a petition for a skate park in Goldsboro.
They traveled door-to-door, asking for signatures, created an online petition and left a hard copy of the petition at Bicycle World.
The boys, both 14, collected hundreds of signatures in only a few weeks.
Following the success of their petition, Lancaster and Gillespe approached Barnard for guidance before presenting their idea to the Goldsboro City Council.
After making their city council presentation, O'Reilly's Auto Parts called Barnard and offered the land beside the business as a site for the park. In only slightly more than six months, Lancaster and Gillespe's idea became a reality that saw construction on the park begin in July.
The park's completion comes roughly one year after the two boys addressed the City Council.
Expenses incurred from building the concrete pad for the park were paid for by a line item transfer from Parks and Recreation's sidewalk budget for $15,000 to pay for laying concrete on the site. Minor repairs were done on the modular skate park before the pieces were installed.