Thank you for visiting our pop-up skatepark only eight months ago, saying, “There’s a new supervisor in town!” and telling Dawn Perfect and myself that you would expressly encourage your team to find creative solutions to expedite our skatepark project.
Just a few months later, in March, Marcus Lubich, county project manager, spoke to our Parks and Rec Planning Group subcommittee and told us there was no way to expedite the skatepark project. They would not buy designated land for it, we were told. It is part of the master plan of the Ramona Intergenerational Community Center (FICC) and they aren’t going to change the plan now, Lubich said.
But he was encouraging, at least, in advising that construction of the RICC is about to begin, so that’s a good sign.
On the night of July 7, Emily Hubbard, a senior park project manager with the county, advised the Ramona Planning Group that there’s really no way to know if there will be a skatepark at the RICC because it’s just too far out. Whenever we get there, we’ll do community outreach to learn what the community wants there and it could be anything, she said.
This is an unacceptable change in language when you people have been stringing us along for 25 years with a master plan and a bunch of excuses!
Hubbard’s team suggested that if I want a change in that language, I need to speak to you. I am cynical at this point. You said a lot of words to me already, and the result of your words was the greatest setback in verbal agreements we’ve had in the 25-year life of this project.
There is no space in Ramona to build parks like skateparks or BMX parks or parks with any features because you relegate only floodplain land to parks, and the Army Corps of Engineers won’t let us build anything. All we get are field sports and horseshoe pits.
If you do not keep it in mind that a skatepark is a non-negotiable part of the master plan at the RICC, you will give away all the buildable space to building projects and leave us with the floodplain in the back for park space. Then you’ll pat yourselves on the back for adding parks to Ramona. That is unacceptable.
Because you won’t move it off the RICC to expedite it, the skatepark is a non-negotiable feature of its master plan. When we get there, you can start building it right away. Heck you can start planning it now. You do not need to waste any more of our valuable time on community outreach.
The community outreach has been done, and the master plan was the result of a community mandate. We need to do this faster — not waste time on community outreach and make more talk and more excuses.
If you can’t expedite this project, please don’t mess it up!
This is a big deal to our community. We are watching you and we do not accept any change in language related to this project, unless it is to surprise us with a quicker way.
Any time you add more county land in Ramona, you add it to open space preserve and pat yourselves on the back that you did something for Ramona. That’s nonsense.
We need buildable park land so we can build a skatepark, a BMX park, a teen center, a splash pad or water feature, all the amenities every community around us enjoys, but all we get are more trails.
The next county land you buy should be for parks for our kids, especially teens, that they can use daily after school without needing a car. You can’t put all of our parks in a floodplain. We need to build things for our kids.
We want to invest in our kids. It is the county that does not. More specifically, with this newest change in language, you.
If I meet with you, will you do like you did last time? Encourage me then hand me off to a team that is unwilling to solve the problem and regresses to 1990’s thinking about the RICC?
I’ll be reporting your response (or lack of ) to our ers.
Tracy Engel is president of Skatepark Champions
