[img]9|left||remove link|no_popup[/img]After they don their jammies, I am not sure what Bill LaPointe and Don Pedersen do at the end of every evening.
But if they are conducting themselves as responsible civil servants, this is what the Parks and Recreation Director and the Police Chief should be doing just before bedtime.
Drop to their knees, position their sensitive elbows on the chubbiest part of their blanketed beds, shutter their eyes and roar into what I trust is their most fervent wish.
“Please, God,” they begin.
“While I am slumbering tonight, find a way to stir the trade winds so that about 3 a.m., a wind of hurricane force whistles down Jefferson Boulevard and blows away our miserable new Skateboard Park.”
Both Mr. LaPointe and Mr. Pedersen are in a public pinch.
The masses of skateboarders who descend on the park every day from dawn until dusk blatantly refuse to don safety equipment, helmets, elbow pads and knee pads.
Less than two weeks after the park’s grand opening, I detect no sense of urgency around City Hall about answering the thumb in their eye..
These skaters are big and rugged boys. When they fall down, the cement surface may be in more trouble than their undainty bodies.
Secondly, if you have driven by or, better, strolled by Culver City Park, you instantly realize this is not an altar boys’ reunion.
They do not appear to be the cream of Westside teenhood.
How About a Three-‘Coarse’ Meal?
If you invited them home for dinner, some would be as likely to enter through a window or another crevice as the front door. I am reminded of the advice of an old editor, the late Hugh Baker: “You should nail your sox on.”
Being government, the problem casually reposes in a file cabinet somewhere around here. Don’t ask where. No voices are being raised. No one is segueing into a hurry-up mode.
Complaints from inside and outside of City Hall about how nearly all skaters are laughing at the rules as they blithely gun across the cement have been neatly rolled up and tucked safely into a prosaic-looking envelope marked “When You Have Time.”
Backing Away
Since the supposedly binding rules have been so roundly ignored, Mayor Alan Corlin suggested at a recent City Council meeting that the requirements be softened into suggestions.
Whenever I talk to Chief Pedersen over at Serene Central, I always think that if I adopted his approach to life, I could live until 45 or 50 without working up one drop of perspiration.
“I am waiting to see what direction we get” — that was the chief’s message this morning.
Follow the Meandering Path
It seems Parks and Recreation has been charged with figuring out whether to enforce, or to what degree. They will then hand off to the City Council for further reflection.
Isn’t anyone around here in a slight rush?
The next generation of helmet-less scofflaws will be skating in the park before the Molasses Men of City Hall render a thoroughly studied, and re-studied, decision.
Matter of Negotiation
In view of the present 100 percent absence of enforcement, I asked Chief Pedersen whether a hardline or velvet glove approach would be more effective to start with. “My personal preference,” he said,“is to seek a solution without enforcement, to somehow try and gain voluntary compliance.”
Laudable.
But if there is a showdown, my money is on the kids.
