By Brian Arola
Completing Northfield’s skate park has been a long grind.
Years of lobbying by a local skateboard coalition culminated in the city finishing one part of a two-phase project in 2015. A decade later, the park remains halfway done, said Tyler Westman, owner of the city’s Northside Boards shop.
Plans to get it done are finally rolling again, after the Legislature recently appropriated grants to the project and other skate parks around the state. “Phase two will come to life because of this money,” Westman said. “We’ll probably get the park we were promised, so I’m very grateful, very excited about that.”
Few proposals made the cut for cash from the state’s general fund, as opposed to funding derived from bond sales, during the Legislature’s special session. The exclusive list features $3.5 million for a wastewater project in Litchfield, $750,000 to the Minnesota Transportation Museum and $325,000 for a Hubert H. Humphrey statue.
What got the most general fund money of all? Eight skate park projects that, when combined together, came in at $4 million.
Considering how many competing interests jockey for limited resources each session, the Legislature’s inclusion of skate parks might raise some eyebrows. But the money was actually first appropriated in the much bigger, $1.1 billion cash bonding bill of 2023. So what lawmakers did during the special session was more of a redirection of the funding through the Department of Employment and Economic Development to specific uses.
To the people who’ve been working to expand, renovate or build skate parks from scratch, the grants are the state’s way of playing catch up to bring skateboard infrastructure in line with the sport’s popularity. “Each city has really been working on this for years, if not decades, trying to get skate parks across the finish line,” said Paul Forsline, executive director of the City of Skate organization.
Here’s how the $4 million is being divided:
-Brainerd’s Memorial Park — $750,000-Rochester’s Silver Lake Park — $650,000-Winona’s Multiuse street park — $550,000-Northfield’s Memorial Park — $500,000-St. Paul’s Merriam Park — $500,000-Minneapolis’ Folwell Park – $400,000-Minnetonka’s Glen Lake Park — $400,000-Minneapolis’ Central Gym Park — $250,000
City of Skate, based in the Twin Cities, spearheaded efforts to secure funding for the parks — four in the metro area and four in Greater Minnesota. The grant program focused on skate park funding has been in place since 2020, but never before had it been utilized with such specificity.
Up until this session it felt like every other recreational activity got its due, Forsline said. “The money was never there for us,” he recalled being told in the past. “Even though there always seemed to be money for ice arenas and field sports.”
State Sen. Scott Dibble, DFL-Minneapolis, and former state House Speaker Paul Thissen — now a Minnesota Supreme Court justice — were early champions of skate park grants.
On Monday, Dibble, who extolled skateboarding’s virtues on the Senate floor when the Legislature established the funding stream in 2020, said he’s happy that funding for specific parks crossed the finish line this session. He wants the program to grow to support more projects around the state. “The fact of the matter is there are many, many thousands of young people who participate in skateboarding who wouldn’t otherwise be participating in other kinds of sports,” he said. “Our failure to serve them would mean they simply go unserved.”
Establishing the program in 2020, securing initial funding in 2023, then carrying it over to named projects in 2025 required enough other lawmakers to get on board. State Sen. Rich Draheim, R-Madison Lake, wasn’t a fan. He brought up his disapproval during an interview with MinnPost reacting to the legislative session earlier this month. “Nothing against skate parks, but our job is to prioritize,” he said. “It’s hard for me to pick money for a skate park over some of my communities that don’t have clean drinking water.”
Water infrastructure projects did receive $176 million in general obligation bond funding this session. Draheim would’ve rather seen more cash funding go directly to water projects instead of skate parks.
Zach Krage, owner of Anthem skate park and board shop in Winona, sees the funding as leveling the playing field. Outdoor baseball fields, basketball hoops and tennis courts aren’t hard to come by and are generally free to use. Skate parks are rare in comparison and sometimes come with a cost to participate. “Skateboarding in many cases has a paywall, and I think that’s unfair to young athletes,” he said. “I think it’s just being equitable.”
Winona once had an outdoor skate park. Intentions for the park were seemingly good; the execution wasn’t. Skater input wasn’t prioritized in the plans, Krage said, leading to a little-used facility. “It was like building a basketball court with 15-foot hoops and wondering why nobody plays on it,” he said.
He opened Anthem indoors after the outdoor park’s removal. A free place to skate outdoors would be a worthwhile community investment, he said, and groups have so far raised at least $113,000 toward the goal.
Skateboarding has a counter-cultural image, which Krage thinks is partly created by city policies. Absent skate parks, young people find other places in the community to spend their time until they get pushed out. “When you’re told you shouldn’t be here and you get kicked out of a place, you’ll have a chip on your shoulder,” he said. “I don’t see that in towns that have skate parks.”
In a world of heavily structured youth sports, Westman likes how skating is refreshingly freeform. There is no rigid practice schedule and no scoreboard. Even if someone doesn’t feel like skating or scootering or BMXing at a park, going there to socialize with friends won’t get them shooed away.
In that way, skate parks are examples of third places, a term used for social environments that aren’t home, school or work. One analysis, published in the Health & Place academic journal in 2019, found these outlets were being overlooked by policymakers despite their vital community roles as places for socialization. The researchers concluded this before the COVID-19 pandemic, a time associated with the closure of many third places. Reviving third places has been a focus of occasional news coverage, including by MinnPost, in the years since.
Skateboarder input needs to be centered if parks are to become these places. Krage and Westman said plans in Winona and Northfield are keeping this top of mind.
In Northfield’s case, current renderings call for the park to double in size. More space is what Max Casson, 20, and Louden Weis, 18, are looking for at their hometown park, as loyal as they are to it as is. They dropped into an avocado-shaped bowl Friday as a demonstration of how they use it.
Getting a fully completed park would be a dream, Casson said. “Northfield has sort of become so accepting of so many other creative pursuits,” he said. “Having a finished skate park could really allow skateboarding to become one of those pursuits that’s accepted by the community.”