austin skate notes

Kent Dahlgren, executive director of Skaters for Public Skateparks, wrote a well-researched article about the importance of street skating in public skateparks. Definitely worth a read. Also worth passing on to your local parks and recreation director if you’re interested in getting terrain built for street skaters in public parks. It’s a 31mb download in PDF format.

After a few calls by Bastrop Child Protective Services, word is spreading through the Central Texas skate scene about the convicted sex offender organizing a mini ramp skate jam next weekend (August 26). After serving 15 years for the aggravated sexual assault of a nine-year-old girl, Jack A. Locke has assimilated back into society as the father of several children. There has been no indication that Locke has or will abuse another victim, yet Bastrop Child Protective Services staffers are concerned that he’s creating an environment with this indoor ramp that could enable him to hurt another child.

KVUE ran a news story about the situation this evening where they interviewed the proprietor of Bastrop’s Surfin’ Cowboy skate shop and a friend of the organizer of the skate jam. Although they conducted an interview with Jack Locke, they did not air his own voice explaining his motives and instead paraphrased him. His willingness to go on camera to defend himself does speak well of his intentions.

His son is a skateboarder and hopefully will not be targetted for harrassment over the actions of his father 20 years ago.

Texas’ annual tax-free back-to-school weekend starts today. All clothes and most wearable items are available for purchase without paying sales tax, so it’s a great opportunity to stock up on skate shoes and support our local skate shop proprietors while skipping out on paying the man. Here’s a handy list of what items qualify and don’t. Odd, hoisery, dresses, baby clothes, and diapers are tax-free, but rollerblades are not.

So I called up some of the local skate shops to see if they had anything special going on this weekend sales-wise. Here are the responses:

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San Antonio, the city that keeps apologizing to skaters for screwups like LBJ and it’s various jagged prefab rustpiles, once again foisted a pile of crap on a concrete slab and labelled it a skatepark earlier this year. Stinging from skater criticism, the city’s parks and recreation department insists that skateboarder input was gathered during the project and somehow this unskateable mess was a mistake beyond their control. Well, it’s done a good job correcting this mistake by hiring Austin’s new skatepark construction company, Lonestar Skateparks, to come in and retrofit the slab with some skateable concrete elements. Dave and his crew just finished up the project this weekend and the results are a huge improvement.

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