The Skateboard Park is Town property

Ideas on what to do to attract more people that wish to live in Bruderheim

By Walter Schneider

Cleaning up around up the Skateboard Park

For us to be able to attract more families — families with children or planning to have children — to come to Bruderheim and settle here, a little extra is required.  As good as Bruderheim looks, it must and can be made to look better. 

Maybe that is what Bruderheim is doing, but one has to wonder. 

Warning! Parents and kids alike, be careful about how you play at the Skateboard Park.  Someone broke a diet-soft-drink bottle right at the south edge of the pavement of the Skateboard Park.  It seems that he even made sure that the glass broke into a lot of small and sharp pieces by stepping on the bottle (or by driving over it, as a lawn mower would scatter glass that effectively). Pieces of glass were then apparently thrown into the grass south of the Skateboard Park.  If anyone plays there barefooted, or even if he rolls around in the grass, he is sure to get hurt. Those pieces of glass were found in the grass about 30 feet away from the Skateboard Park. Whoever broke that bottle and then made sure it got scattered around, did doing that make you feel good?  Of course, it is possible, however unlikely, that the bottle got broken and scattered when the lawn tractor rode over it.  That is not entirely unlikely, as the lawn-tractor operator appears to have the habit of not picking up any of the garbage there before cutting the grass.  Soft-drink cups, drinking straws and cans all get routinely shredded by the lawn mower.  That makes cleaning up after the fact a lot of work and almost impossible.

The skateboard park, north of the old curling rink (the old curling rink is now used by the Bruderheim Youth Club) and the area around it and around the Youth Club is supposed to be kept tidy by the youngsters using those facilities.  The youngsters, left to themselves, are not doing a good job of keeping things clean.  Even pigs don't eat where they s..t, but the kids using the Youth Club and the skateboard facility are not bothered eating and drinking right amongst the garbage and litter they drop around the facilities the town's taxpayers set up for them so that they have something to do if they want to kill their boredom.

Come on kids, the mess you create around your facilities would not make you happy in your own backyards.  Why do you make so much mess around the skateboard park and the Youth Club?  During the interval from June 2nd to June 11th, Mrs. Genier cleaned up after you every day.  Don't you have more sense than pigs have?  You should be ashamed of yourself.  For instance, why would anyone in his right mind throw soft-drink containers, candy wrappers, cigarette packages and even liquor bottles onto the ground in a public place when a garbage barrel has been set up for him right there?  You guys even ripped apart and dropped a perfectly good BMX bike there!

Look, if garbage — and playing, eating and drinking in it — makes you so happy, and  if you like garbage that much, why don't you give me a call and I'll drive you out to, and drop you off at, the St. Michael dump; for you to play, eat and drink in the sort of surroundings that you like to make for yourself?

I know, kids, most of you don't make that mess around there, but maybe you could all try to straighten out those that do.  If you do nothing more than to pick up a piece of garbage now and then, even if you didn't drop the garbage that you pick up, that will make a big difference.  Others will then begin to do the same thing.  In no time at all your skateboard park will then come to look nice and tidy, just as if it were the lawn where you live.  There's nothing wrong with that idea, right?

Grass cutting and weed control are necessary, but so are paint jobs and other maintenance work.  Moreover, picking up litter is just as important.

Some people expressed concern that by pointing out neglected things in need of paint or a bit of other attention our taxes will go up because more work needs to be done.  Well, the hard and cold reality is that, collectively, we all own the town's properties.  The town's properties are here to stay whether there are only a thousand taxpayers in town or whether we attract another thousand that will help pay for our properties' upkeep.  However, if we don't keep things tidy and in good state of repair, we will not attract the people that can help all of us share our basic and more or less fixed tax load.   The reality of that is that the fewer people we attract, and the more people leave town, the higher each of the individual shares of the tax load will go, and the more dilapidated the town properties that we all own will become.

The skateboard park is a nice thing to have.  A lot of kids in Bruderheim like it, but it needs to be maintained if it is to last for a few years.  It took less than a year for the skate-board ramp to be damaged.  What good did that do?

Certainly, we could save money by not doing any maintenance on the skateboard equipment at all, but what will we and our kids gain from that?  Efforts to keep the equipment in good state of repair and to get the kids to take care of their littering the way it should be looked after will be good for all.

While it is being considered to do the necessary repair to the skateboard ramp (apparently there is a replacement ramp in the Town's workshop but no time to install it), it should also be considered how to do it so that the repair will last longer than less than a year — the length of time it took to become necessary.  Otherwise we will quite possibly have to do the repairs year after year.  Sunramp may not be the best party to consult for tips on long-lasting repairs on skateboard ramps.

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Posted June 11, 2005
Updates:
2006 10 29 (reformated)