Dean Wong/staff
The former Safeway building at Northwest 57th Street and 22nd Avenue Northwest will soon make way for a new downtown Ballard park. Whether it will contain amenities for skateboarders is the subject of ongoing debate.

The Seattle Parks Board listened to a staff presentation on the preferred design for the park before hearing two hours of largely pro-skateboarding public testimony at the South Lake Union Armory Thursday night. It was the final opportunity for public input on the park design and some of the commissioners proved to be a sympathetic audience.

“I feel like the city has failed by not providing a skate park in Ballard,” said Commissioner Joanna Grist, who has been a volunteer with the parks board for a year. “I’d like to see a bowl in the park,” she said.

Board Chairman Bruce Bentley also felt the park needed a bowl. “If I had to make a decision right now, I’d take one with the bowl in place,” he said, referring to an alternative parks department design that featured a skate bowl.

Bentley speculated that most park board members were pro-skate bowl. “If I had to guess, I’d think they’d come down with the bowl in place,” he said.

Parks commissioners rarely differ with staff recommendations. Bentley, a five-year veteran of the parks board, can only recall “two or three times” commissioners contradicted a staff decision.

Bentley was quick to point out that even if the parks board were to reject the staff’s preferred design alternative, the parks superintendent is not obligated to act on the board’s recommendation. Bentley articulated the park board’s lack of authority early in the evening responding to a man angrily shouting, “You blew it,” into a microphone during unrelated testimony at the acoustically friendly Armory.

“We blew nothing,” the parks commissioner said heatedly. “This is a volunteer board that gives recommendations. We don’t have the authority or the ability to handle budgets or anything else.”

On May 13, the board will meet to discuss and vote to accept or reject the staff preferred recommendation before it goes to the park superintendent for a final decision. The meeting is open to the public but the board will not be taking public comments.

Though a rejection of the park staff’s preferred alternative by the board would be a symbolic gesture, it would put Parks Superintendent Kenneth Bounds in an awkward position and likely generate more publicity over the issue.

Bounds will seek additional input on the design from city hall. “Oh, you bet. I’ll ask the mayor,” Bounds said. “It’s a controversy. You make a decision and not everybody’s happy, but you move on,” he added.

Bounds said he would also speak with City Council President Jan Drago about the decision. Drago has publicly supported a skate bowl in Ballard. Aides of the council member circulated press releases to that effect at the previous park hearing.

Though smaller than the previous meeting at the Segway building, the public hearing at the armory was not short of passion.

“I see so many of these kids stuck in their homes all day,“ says Bernadette Roberts, a physical therapist and skate bowl supporter who doesn’t own a skateboard. “They sit around and get overweight and frustrated. They could be out,” she said.

When asked what she saw as the biggest obstacle to having a skate bowl in the park, Roberts responded, “Skateboarding is a demographic that … gets in the way of selling apartments.”

Security Properties, the company creating a mixed-use development adjacent to the park, was a popular target of the pro-skateboard lobby during testimony.

“We don’t think it’s wise to leave the bowl where it is because it’s on the property line,” said John Marasco, who is overseeing the development for Security Properties. When asked whether a skate bowl designed away from the property line would be amenable to the developer, Marasco said, “That’s fair. We would want it to be well conceived and executed.”

Parks staff did not explain the advantages of their preferred alternative design over another staff design that included a skate bowl. When queried by commissioners about the decision making process for the preferred design, Michael Shiosaki, parks planning and development manager, instead focused on why the existing bowl is “…not nicely nestled into the [future] site.”