Ojai City Council Asked to Build Skateboard Park : Recreation: Popularity of a back-yard ramp prompts youths and parents to urge city to fund a public facility.

For almost five months, 15-year-old Jake Frost and his friends labored as much as six hours a day to build a 25-foot-long wooden skateboard ramp in his family’s back yard in Ojai.

The five teen-agers, working about two days a week, finished the ramp in December, despite a neighbor’s written complaint to Ojai officials that noise from skateboarders using the ramp would shatter the neighborhood’s calm.

For Jake and his buddies, however, the five-foot-high ramp provides a far better place than the streets to careen off walls and perform daring aerial maneuvers and other tricks.

“It’s fun to skate,” explained one of Jake’s friends, Juan Barraza, 16. “And there’s really nothing for us to do out here.”

That’s a sentiment shared by more than Jake and his tight-knit circle of sidewalk surfers.

As many as 15 kids at a time started showing up at the Frost house to do airs, plants and grinds--some coming from as far as Ventura.

Now, Jake’s mother, Kathy, is leading a group of neighbors and parents to request that Ojai build a public skateboard park that would lure some of the skateboarders away.

“I’d rather the city do it because it’s too a big of a facility for a neighborhood to sustain,” Kathy Frost said.

Frost has even offered to donate the back-yard ramp to the city--under protests by Jake and his friends. But the city informed her that Ojai lacks the funds to move or maintain the ramp.

Frost and other parents say Ojai teen-agers need more places for recreation. And teen-agers agree: A youth representative to Ojai’s Parks and Recreation Commission who surveyed the city’s teen-agers said they ranked a skateboarding park No. 1 on their wish list.

What’s more, some proponents of a skateboarding facility argue, it’s time to get the speedsters away from customers shopping downtown at the Arcade, off the streets--and out of Jake’s back yard.

The City Council has agreed--in concept.

At a packed council meeting last month, Kathy Frost joined about 40 skateboarders and several of their parents in helping to lobby for approval of a public park for skateboarding.

At the meeting, Casey Murphey, 16, offered to help design a facility and keep it in good condition. “We really have nowhere to go . . .. The bowling alley is going to be closed down--that’s the only other recreation I can think of.”

Skaters and parents also noted that many other cities in California--including Camarillo--provide safe and widely used facilities.

The issue of possible lawsuits the city could face if youngsters are injured skateboarding in a public facility is not a problem, Parks Commissioner Craig Walker told the council.

A state law protects owners of recreational property in injury lawsuits as long as safety signs are posted, Walker said.

Walker said a skateboard park may range in size from the area of a tennis court to about one-third of an acre, and can cost from $16,000

to $100,000. City officials have said community money would have to be raised to pay for a skateboard facility, if one is given final approval.

But detractors have argued that skating is a fad and the city should be wary of investing time and effort into such a project.

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In unanimously approving the concept of a skateboarding park, the council instructed a task force of merchants, skateboarders and city and school officials to report back to them on possible locations for the facility, and how money could be raised for its construction.

Several speakers at the meeting suggested converting an unused portion of Ojai’s Park and Ride lot for the facility.

Preliminary research indicates there is plenty of community support for a skateboard park, said Carol Belser, the city’s director of recreation.

Last spring, Belser said, the Parks and Recreation Commission surveyed two local schools. At Matilija Junior High, 46% of those surveyed said they would regularly use a skateboard facility. And at Nordhoff High School, that number was 58%.

And a separate questionnaire sent to local merchants and adult residents yielded 174 favorable responses and only two unfavorable replies, she said.

Until the city makes a final decision, the ramp at the Frost home continues to draw local skaters, although the numbers have dropped off in the last few months.

At the height of the ramp’s popularity, Frost said, skateboarders flocking to use it created parking problems on her four-house cul-de-sac and occasionally disrupted mail delivery and trash pickup.

Juan Barraza said some days a crowd would collect to watch the skaters perform their high-flying maneuvers. “There would be five guys on one side waiting to skate, five on the other side, and about five guys watching.”

Frost said she has taken pains to keep the problems to a minimum, making sure skaters don’t drink alcohol or play loud music and that they leave by dark.

And last year, after she got a letter from a neighbor expressing concern about the ramp, the teen-age builders placed carpet padding under the wood and relaid its Masonite surface to help deaden sound.

An Ojai building official has inspected the ramp and said it meets city requirements.

But some neighbors say the ramp is a nuisance.

“They’re driving us crazy,” said Tiba Willner, 88. “It was so noisy and it kept going on in the late afternoon and the early evening . . . I’m a stroke victim and I need rest.”

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Willner agreed with the need for a public skateboarding facility.

“I think any activity that keeps kids out of the street is fine,” Willner said. “But it should be in the park, and it should not be in the residential areas.”

For the past 2 1/2 years, Frost, 43, has taken in several troubled friends of her son, feeding and housing them for months at a time.

She said she originally supported building the ramp as a way to help her son and other youths who come from troubled backgrounds or broken homes. “I think these kids are used to quitting or giving up,” she said. But building the ramp “they couldn’t quit. It was a project that, if they wanted to use it, they had to finish it.”

And skateboarding, Frost said, is invaluable for troubled “lost boys” who don’t play team sports, yet need an athletic outlet.

“It releases a lot of their aggression and anger,” she said.

Even after his hard work helping to build the ramp at the Frosts’ house, Juan said he’d still like to see the city build a public skateboard ramp. The back-yard ramp is getting worn down by Ventura kids, Juan complained, who fly so far off the ramp that their skateboards crack the Masonite when they land.

A public skating park “would be cool,” he said. “I’d skate it.”