By CAM LUCADOU-WELLS
SKATERS have hit out at delays to opening Noble Park’s keenly-awaited skate park due to a last-minute safety audit.
Greater Dandenong councillor Peter Brown, who last month called for the audit, told a council meeting last Monday that a resident blamed him for the Ross Reserve skate park not opening for the upcoming school holidays.
A man from Western Australia said the councillor was “disadvantaging skaters from around Australia”, Cr Brown told the meeting.
Cr Brown had labelled the $1 million-plus park’s performance bowl as a “massive” and “unprotected” drop that could potentially lead to a fatality.
Sticking to his guns at the meeting, Cr Brown said: “One body at any skate park is one too many.“
Cr Brown copped flak from the Journal website’s comment section, some ridiculing his estimate of a six or seven metre drop.
One comment-writer decried the “nanny state rubbish”, another wrote: “Bugger the security… the park is completed I’m going skateboarding before your audit thank you.”
Veteran skate legend Jon McGrath, who designed the “state-of-the-art” skate park, told the Journal the hold-up was “red-tape”.
“From what I understand the council was just worried about the people walking off the street and walking around it. It’s probably the case of just putting a fence around it.”
He said skate parks were not the stereotypical ghettos but that they created opportunities for young people to “rock up to a space and work with others”.
“It’s so mainstream, it’s not funny.”
Mr McGrath, who lives within a kilometre of the skate-park, said he’d spent more than two years or 1500 hours on the project.
“I scrapped a whole design after six months,” he said.
“I’m passionate about it, I’ve done a lot of homework on it. It’s got my name on it.”
The bowl section was in the “top five in the world for design” and the best in Australia, joining a classic snake-run element and a street course.
“You should see the young guys in the bowl,” he said.
“I still have a ball in it but the young kids tear the thing apart.”
Greater Dandenong Council’s engineering services director Julie Reid stated the depth would be less than 3.5 metres.
She told last Monday’s meeting there was never any guarantee that the skate park would have been finished by the school holidays.
She said the park would open after a safety-benchmark assessment and mitigation strategies were completed.
See comments on Socially Speaking, page 6.
