When Jeff Marshall started Buzz Bomb Skateboards, he was thinking about more than a business.
“I started my skateboard company to keep kids that I knew that had potential out of drugs,” Marshall said. “Because it gave them motivation, and it gave them determination. They started to take their focus from recreation and partying to skateboarding, because they said somebody is going to believe in me.”
He added, “The problem is, I have to drive them an hour and a half every week to take them skating.”
Marshall travels so far because Concord’s own skateboard park near Everett Arena is in disrepair. Despite a large and active community of skateboarders in the area, the small collection of obstacles hasn’t been updated since they were first built in the 1990s. When a group of local skateboarders tried to install their own improvements in 2014, the city dismantled them, citing liability issues.
But since then, the park’s regulars and city officials have been meeting to plan a face-lift. On Tuesday night, a small but vocal crew of skateboarders met with Ward 9 Councilor Candace Bouchard and grounds division supervisor Chris Jacques to plan the next step. The group included park regulars, as well as business owners like Marshall and Melody Broider of Spank Alley Skate & Board Shop on South Main Street.
The design would need to make its way through the Recreation and Parks Advisory Committee and the Concord City Council, and the skateboarders would likely need to fundraise much of the money for the project. But Bouchard noted a project included in the proposed budget for fiscal year 2017: a replacement for the old skatehouse near the pond at White Park. Half of the $900,000 budget would likely come from the nonprofit Friends of White Park, and the city would match the other half.
“That would be ideal,” Bouchard said. “The city does seem to like partnerships. . . . The council wouldn’t put forward matching dollars or put any dollars forth without having some sort of plan or design.”
So the group of skateboarders homed in on models for Concord, pointing to parks in Hampton, Plymouth and Portland, Maine, and regularly travel to Pepperell, Mass. While they estimated that park is more than a decade old, its surface is made of concrete, rather than asphalt. That material has held up better over the years, they said. They wanted a bowl in particular, but emphasized obstacles friendly to a range of skill levels.
No matter what, the entire room agreed the skateboarders should have a strong say in how the park would look and what its obstacles would be.
“There has to be a definite ‘wow’ factor if we’re going to revamp the park,” Jacques said. “It really isn’t going to be a cookie cutter design.”
The group said visitors and passers-by expect the capital city to have a better park, but are often disappointed by what they find on the bank of the Merrimack River.
“In Concord, there’s a huge skater scene,” Alex McFarlin said. “Concord is one of the biggest skate scenes in New Hampshire, if not New England.”
While they recently hosted a cleanup at the park with the city, the skateboarders said a nicer park would be less susceptible to littering. Taylor Perron has seen kids leave trash in Concord.
“They don’t think twice about it, it just goes on the ground,” he said. “Nowhere else would you do that. . . . There’s no pride.”
“You take those kids to Hampton’s park, and they’re like, ‘I’m not going to leave that there,’ ” Marshall added.
The group agreed to meet again in a month to discuss more specific designs for the park. In the meantime, Bouchard and Jacques also suggested a road trip to scout out the Portland park.
“We’ll meet you guys there,” Perron said. “We’ll skate first.”
(Megan Doyle can be reached at 369-3321, mdoyle@cmonitor.com or on Twitter @megan_e_doyle.)