DATE: Friday, October 17, 1997              TAG: 9710150113

SECTION: CHESAPEAKE CLIPPER      PAGE: 07   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: COVER STORY 

SOURCE: BY LEWIS KRAUSKOPF, STAFF WRITER 

                                            LENGTH:   47 lines

CITY FEATURED ON NATIONAL SKATE-PARK VIDEO

Chesapeake is one of 20 cities nationwide featured in a video on how to build a public skate park.

``The S.Park Revolution'' is produced by Airwalk, which makes shoes and clothing often worn by skateboarders.

The 1996 video provides information to cities for building a public skate park and shows interviews with parks and recreation officials, politicians and police officers from cities that already have parks.

Virginia Beach has looked at the tape as it considers building a skate park.

The video includes footage of parks in Philadelphia, Boulder, Colo., Portland, and Santa Cruz, Calif., among other cities.

The hour-long tape begins by defending skateboarding, attacking what it calls misperceptions about the sport. Police officers and other city officials say on the video how skateboarders aren't trouble-makers, but are forced to skate on streets, often illegally, because there is nowhere else for them to go.

Trying to dispel fears that skate parks bring massive liability claims to cities, the video includes interviews with city officials saying that they have had no such lawsuits since their parks have been built.

The second part of the tape outlines how cities could best design and finance a park.

Chesapeake's park is mentioned in the section on how large a skate park should be. Chesapeake's is 12,000-square-feet, within the 10,000- to 20,000-square-foot range the video suggests.

The city is also the example given in the video's section on how a park can be funded through community donations. Councilman Peter P. Duda Jr. and Deputy Fire Chief Stephen R. Best talk on the video about how the fire department and businesses gave time, money and materials to build the park, which cost about $48,000.

``The city came together as one . . . ,'' Duda says on the video, which Airwalk provides to cities for free. ``Everybody was tickled to death; the kids were tickled to death. And everybody said after it opened that it was a great facility.''

Best says the video has garnered Chesapeake attention from all over the country, including cities in Florida, Oregon, Alabama and Texas.

``We get calls from cities every week asking how'd you do this,'' Stuart said.

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