DATE: Wednesday, October 15, 1997           TAG: 9710150495

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B9   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY JON GLASS, STAFF WRITER 

DATELINE: NORFOLK                           LENGTH:   63 lines

SKATING BAN ROLLS THROUGH NORFOLK COUNCIL

Downtown doesn't mix with skateboarders and skaters, the City Council decided Tuesday.

The council unanimously adopted an ordinance allowing the city to ban skateboarding, inline skating and roller skating from sidewalks in the city where problems with the popular activities arise.

Council members and city officials said that, at this point, they intend to limit the ban to sections of downtown, where merchants and business owners have complained about young skateboarders destroying property and posing safety hazards to pedestrians and themselves.

``There should be places where they are limited to,'' Vice Mayor Herbert M. Collins Sr. said after Tuesday's meeting. ``There's just too much pedestrian activity down there, and I feel somebody would eventually get hurt.''

Under the ordinance, any sidewalk placed off limits to skateboarding would have to be ``conspicuously posted'' with signs stating that the uses are not allowed. And on sidewalks that aren't off limits, the ordinance requires skateboarders and skaters to yield the right-of-way to pedestrians.

Norfolk already has an ordinance that bans skateboards and all skating on city streets. Even so, inline skating on neighborhood streets remains popular. City officials acknowledged that the law banning street skating is not vigorously enforced.

``We can't do 100 percent enforcement of laws, but I think if there's a complaint or a danger we would exercise that rule,'' said Sterling Cheatham, an assistant city manager.

City Attorney Bernard Pishko said the new sidewalk ordinance was intended to address a specific problem downtown, and that common sense should prevail when weighing how far to exercise the law.

``I think the city wants to address a problem, it doesn't want to create one,'' he said.

Cheatham said it's doubtful that all sidewalks downtown will be placed off limits to skateboarding and skating, but he said decisions haven't been made yet about which ones will. Many of the complaints from merchants and property owners have occurred on Main, Bank and Plume streets and near the City Hall Avenue area.

Signs could be posted within the next month, he said.

The ordinance had the support of the Downtown Norfolk Council, a group made up of those with business and professional interests. Merchants said skateboarders, in a maneuver called ``grinding,'' jump up on curbs, benches, steps and other property to slide down them, often marking or breaking concrete and marble.

But some Norfolk citizens think the city is going too far to ban the activity.

``This is government at its absolute worst,'' said Richard DiPeppe, a Norfolk resident who fired off a letter to the mayor's office Tuesday after learning of the move. DiPeppe said he has skated downtown for the past four years and has never witnessed any problems.

``This proposal is not about danger, or property or anything, but a perception on the part of some individuals about skaters,'' DiPeppe wrote in the letter. He added: ``City Hall seems to equate the quality of life to only those things that they think bring dollars to the City Hall coffers.''

City Councilwoman Daun S. Hester said she has been meeting with some of the youthful skateboarders to discuss other locations that the city might make available for a park or ramps. Currently, the city has one outdoor inline skating facility, but does not offer anything for skateboarders. A ramp at Northside Park was dismantled several years ago for lack of use.

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