Phase one of Villa Park skate park complete

VILLA PARK — This time last year, Paulina Jimenez was anxious. She was going through the motions of everyday life, but somewhere in the back of her mind the anxiety lingered, as did her growing impatience.

Jimenez had been to Springfield with a group of representatives from the Villa Park Parks and Recreation Department and the Villa Park Skate Park committee that Jimenez helped found in 2005.

The group was vying for an Open Space Land Acquisition Grant that would help fund the construction of a new skate park in town. Jimenez had been leading the charge by organizing fundraisers, applying for grants and raising awareness since she took her young son, Joel Anderson, to the village’s existing skate park and saw that it was poorly maintained and dangerous for skaters.

Her trip to Springfield in the fall of 2011 was the second time the Parks and Recreation Department applied for the grant, and Jimenez was nervous. If the grant when through, the project would become a reality. If it didn’t, she’d go back to the drawing board. Again.

Life in Villa Park went on as usual as she waited through January of 2012, the anticipated time for the grant recipients to be announced, and waited further into the spring.

Finally, on June 23, the good news came in — Villa Park was on the list when Gov. Pat Quinn announced the latest OLSAD grant recipients. The Village was awarded $239,600, roughly half of the entire budgeted cost of the project. Phase One budgeted for the construction of the new, concrete skate park. Phase Two will include a children’s garden, playground equipment, butterfly garden, bocce ball courses and more.

Once the grant money was secured, things kicked into high gear, and Jimenez breathed a sigh of relief.

On Nov. 5, village trustees, officials from the Parks and Recreation department, Jimenez and several other community leaders in Villa Park congregated at the site of the new park, next to the existing Iowa Community Center, to celebrate the groundbreaking of the project’s first phase.

Along with the groundbreaking, a few new faces rolled into town.

Billy and Catherine Coulon and their crew from Evergreen Skateparks, a company based in Portland, Ore. got busy making Paulina's goal and the dream of young skaters and BMXers throughout the village a reality. Evergreen Skateparks builds professional, California-style skate parks throughout the world.

Because weather was a factor, construction moved quickly. Concrete cannot be poured once temperatures dip to about 35 degrees, and just about six weeks after the grand opening, Villa Park’s brand new skate park facility was built.

“The concrete is all poured, the last inspection was today and they passed,” Jimenez said the afternoon of Dec. 17. “It was perfect.”

The presence of the Evergreen crew, with their pet dogs joining them on the construction site, became a much-talked about sight in Villa Park, and Jimenez said she’d try to make it out every other day to check on their progress.

“I was there, I was willing to do anything to help them get it done right, even if it was just bringing them coffee,” she said. “We were in good hands (with Evergreen).”

The crew from Evergreen gave the park a test-skate before they left town, allowing Villa Park Argus photographers to show readers what the park might look like with skaters present. Although construction is complete on the skate park itself, the actual grand opening won’t happen until sometime in the spring, said Greg Gola, executive director of the Villa Park Parks and Recreation Department.

Right now there’s a big pile of mud surrounding the park and some time needs to be allowed for sod to be laid and new grass to be grown. Paths need to be built and other amenities developed before residents and visitors can skate the concrete ramps, bowls, hand rails and other ground features, but Gola said the entire first phase of the park development went very well.

“Awesome,” he said. “They were a little ahead of schedule. They were a great group to work with and everything went really well.”

Bids for the second phase of the project, which will include a new playground, paths and pavers and bocce ball courts will be opened Jan. 17 and construction will start some time in the spring, depending on the weather, he said.

Phase One of the project included construction of the highly-publicized concrete facility for local skaters and BMXers. Gola pointed out that once Phase Two is complete, the space behind the Iowa Community Center will be ready to accommodate the non-skating community.

Having invested more than five years leading this endeavor, Jimenez said she’s most looking forward to seeing the park get used.

“I think I’m most excited about seeing the kids skate and ride their bikes,” she said. “I can just imagine what this means to the kids in the community.”

She also speaks words of praise toward a group of about five or six young men who were teenagers in high school and middle school when Jimenez first started talking about a new skate park. They helped her organize fundraisers, secure the Pepsi Refresh grant, and recruited professional skaters for demo shows.

“Some of them are still here, some have moved on,” she said. “The feedback has been great, but there were moments when they thought it wasn’t going to happen. They were frustrated.”

While she’s waiting for the park to officially open, Jimenez is keeping busy. She’s working with Scott Mitchell, owner of Motiv8 Skate Shop, to plan a demo show that will be part of the grand opening celebration, and has helped secure a grant from the Home Depot Foundation to help pay for the landscaping and children’s garden being built in Phase Two this spring.

She’s also working with the A.skate Foundation, an non-profit organization based in Alabama that holds skateboarding clinics across the country for children with autism. Planning is still in its early phases, but Jimenez said she hopes to bring a clinic to Villa Park next year.

Her work has branded her as the “skate park lady” throughout the village, and she said she gets somewhere between 10 and 12 emails a day from people across the country reaching out to her with questions and ideas.

“It was an incredible experience,” she said, but through it all, the people she turns back to are the young skaters and BMXers who worked long and hard and who waited very patiently for their park to come true.

“It’s a life experience that they will carry with them,” she said. “You can do this, you can achieve things if you work hard.”