Augusta citizen Josh Burns has worked toward getting the city to build a skate park in Augusta since he was in high school in 1999.
“My friends and I started with petitions, but the city never had money for a park,” Burns said.
With the park approved by the city after many years, the next steps were to plan and raise the funds for construction.
“We would follow a guide from the Tony Hawk Foundation,” Burns said. “After that, we would work on getting grants, which we got one from the Tony Hawk Foundation and even one from the state of Kansas.”
The final step toward the construction of the park was finding a builder.
“We went out for bid and had two skatepark building companies for us to evaluate,” Burns said. “After looking into it, we chose Spohn Ranch to build the park because that’s what they specialize in.”
Spohn Ranch is a company from California that exclusively builds skateparks.
“I’ve been working with Spohn Ranch for five years,” head of project Matt Niebehr said. “There really is a lot of work that goes into a project like this, but the biggest is planning and preparation.”
Former Augusta Mayor and business teacher Matt Childers worked closely with Burns on the skatepark during his 2014-2018 mayoral term.
“We had a vote over what we call ‘pride and progress’, which just has us collect vote-approved tax dollars in favor of keeping city locations updated,” Childers said.
The vote for pride and progress was in 2015, so more money had to be collected as other facilities around town were updated.
“The park ended up costing $250,000, which is much more than the original $75,000 we had raised for it,” Childers said.
If the skatepark project is worked on consistently, it is scheduled to be done by October 23, 2023 and Spohn Ranch is still on track for that date.
