City green lights skateboard park at Fenholt

The Columbia Fall City Council last week unanimously gave its blessing for a new skateboard park at Fenholt Park.

About 35 skateboarders and families of skateboarders turned out to support the project. The Badrock Skatepark Association has raised about $400,000 to fund the project, which will be built next summer in the southwest corner of Fenholt Park.

It will not interfere with the baseball outfield or the sledding hill.

Kalispell and Whitefish already have skateboard parks. The effort to bring a park to Columbia Falls has been decades in the making. Skateboarder Barrett Evans noted he first started talking to city officials back in 1997, but funding never came together.

“We didn’t have support in ’97,” he said.

Association President and Columbia Falls resident Matt Holloway said it’s time Columbia Falls had its own park.

He noted that the Whitefish skatepark was built 18 years ago.

“Every time I leave home here and go over there I feel a little bit of guilt because I know there’s a bunch of kids here who don’t have a park,” he told council.

Others agreed, with a host of folks extolling the virtues of skateboarding, from it being good exercise to keeping kids off their phones and the TikTok app.

There was some discussion from council about safety. Councilman Mike Shepard worried about young kids not wearing helmets, but the city was advised by its insurer to not require helmets, as it would need to be policed and could, in essence, open the city to liability.

Montana Municipal Interlocal Authority, which insures the city, doesn’t actually cover skateparks, but an additional rider is available, city manager Susan Nicosia noted.

The city will, however, recommend helmets.

There was also a discussion on whether bicycles will be allowed. Some cities have banned bikes, other allow them.

Holloway suggested the city allow them, as he didn’t want to exclude a user group.

The park will take about a year to design with construction expected to start in July of 2024, said Danyel Scott of Dreamland Skate Parks, contacted after the meeting. Her firm will be designing and building the park. They’ve done hundreds around the world. Scott is a native of Whitefish.

It’s estimated that when complete, this park will be between 8,000 and 12,000 square feet. Holloway has said previously that the goal is to make the park here unique and different from parks in Kalispell and Whitefish.

Once complete, the city would take over ownership of the park, but there was discussion about the association forming an endowment for maintenance of the park into the future.

Scott said parks easily last 35 years if properly maintained.

It takes about three months to build a park, so skaters could be using it by next September if all goes well.