The Stranger: Compromising Positions

The Stranger published an update on the current state of SeaSk8,  the feasibility study that the Seattle Center presented to Council recently, and the role that the City Council is playing in all of this.

It does not come as a shock to any Seattle skateboarder that the newest site comes with $4 million worth of baggage.  In fact, some would suggest that the Seattle Center and the Century 21 Committee, who originally proposed the Pavilion site, were simply setting the skaters up for another shot to the head.  I mean…who in their right mind would get behind a $4 million dollar, 10K sq/ft skatepark?  The City Council assures us that these buildings were scheduled for demolition someday anyway, and that we should just see this as an acceleration in the existing schedule, but that doesn’t really address the negative effects of the new budget revelations.

The overwhelmingly gargantuan budget as outlined by Seattle Center’s report, changes the focus of the discussion from  finding was to make the new skatepark successful and awesome, to simply making it happen without jarring all interested parties into catatonic sticker shock.  Suddenly, pushing for a bit of extra funding so that we can get some integrated art to make the park unique seems trivial and unimportant.  It’s as if the skateboarders are constantly being plunged into the worst-case scenario to encourage them to compromise for something less-awful.

In the end, less-awful is still awful.

It’s unclear to this skateboarder when someone’s going to realize that all of this: the $4 million, the delays, the smaller park, the hassles…would’ve largely been avoided had the corporate tenants of the Seattle Center (EMP, Space Needle, & Pacific Science Center) not been allowed to influence the final resting place of SeaSk8.