Some residents say skate parks are a magnet for graffiti, gang activity and drug dealing. But skaters and police aren’t convinced.

Ian Englehard was attracting a crowd Wednesday afternoon. Preteens on scooters and bikes watched as Englehard went through a series of skateboard maneuvers — “methods,” “tuck knees” and “melons” — at the Timpie Road skate park.

“Aw, that was sweet,” one said after Englehard landed a jump. They all cringed when another jump wasn’t so successful, leaving Englehard on his back grimacing.

Englehard, 18, said this is pretty much what activity at the skate park consists of daily. And since he hasn’t seen a problem with drugs, fighting or other delinquent behaviors, he’s confused by the recent attention the park has been getting from nearby residents who say it should have never been built.

“We’re just kids trying to stay out of trouble by skateboarding,” he said, adding that far too often he and his friends are misjudged by either outward appearance or their hobby of choice and labeled as troublemakers.

The issue of trouble in skate parks came to the forefront last week when a group of residents living near the Timpie Road park complained to the Tooele City Council that more needed to be done to police problems in the area ranging from graffiti to fighting to drug dealing. That’s a concern homeowners near other skate parks in the valley share. Law enforcement officials, however, maintain that while the parks are problem areas that the city constantly has to watch, they are no more a magnet for trouble than anywhere else kids congregate.

“It’s mostly at night when all the problems happen,” said Hayley Huefner, who has lived by the Timpie Road skate park for six years. “But during the day is when we see all the leftovers of what happened, like the [drug] needles and graffiti.”

One evening, Huefner said she even witnessed what she believes to be a drug deal go on right by the skate park.

Tom Swick, who has lived near the park for five years, said the problem of vandalism happens just as much during the day as it does at night.

“Graffiti, beer cans and bottles, condoms, eggs thrown at houses — that’s what we’ve seen,” Swick said. “My suggestion to the city council was to close the park, but have another place where kids can go that is not in a residential neighborhood.”

Englehard said he and other skaters aren’t blind to the graffiti that continually pops up on the concrete ramps.

“It happens, but it happens at night when all the skaters have gone home,” Englehard said. “If there are kids fighting, we’ll stop them. A few years back, I saw a few kids smoking weed, but told them that’s not something you should be doing at a public park. There are kids that have tried to spray paint the park in the middle of the day, and they were immediately told by other kids to leave.”

Most of the valley’s skate parks date from the 1990s, with Timpie being the most recent one built in 2000. Tooele City Councilman Steven Pruden said he feels like the parks have value and shouldn’t just immediately be taken away when problems come up.

“There are groups of kids that are good kids and like to skate and want to have a facility where they can go,” Pruden said. “But just as with everything, you are always going to have an element that abuses and takes advantage of that. The question comes down to a balancing act: How do we serve the neighbors but not penalize good kids who are following the rules and doing what they are asked to do?”

The Timpie Road skate park isn’t the only skateboarding locale that has attracted problems. Parks on 400 North near the Dow James Complex, in Grantsville adjacent to the city park, and in Stansbury Park near the Mill Pond have also seen problems with graffiti and other delinquent behaviors.

The Stansbury skate park has been closed round the clock since October, after it was tagged numerous times and Stansbury Park Service Agency trustees fielded repeated calls from concerned neighbors about profanity and vandalism.

“Since we closed the park, vandalism has gone way down,” said service agency trustee Scott Totman. “The baseball people who operate on the field next door were big proponents of closing it or filling it with sand. They don’t want kids exposed to that kind of behavior.”

Totman said similar problems are reported at other parks throughout Stansbury, but at the skate park the problems are more concentrated. The service agency hopes to reopen the skate park by the end of the month, following the installation of a surveillance system.

“I’ve been working with one group of kids for the last five months and investigated some solutions [that would help reopen the park],” Totman said. “We talked about fences and video surveillance and decided on the latter. It’s in the process of acquisition.”

In Grantsville, police say the skate park is the scene of almost all of the city’s graffiti.

“We see more graffiti at the skate park than anywhere else,” said Detective Dan Chamberlain. “It’s always markered up and spray-painted.”

The department also responds to calls from people using the nearby playground and ball fields, who are concerned about bullying and profanity.

“When we get those calls, we go out and shake the kids up a little bit and let them know that that’s not acceptable behavior,” Chamberlain said.

In the end, however, Chamberlain feels like without a skate park the problems would just move elsewhere in the city.

“At least we have a skate park,” he said. “You might as well give them a place to go, rather than have them sit out in front of Soelbergs.”

Lt. Paul Wimmer, of the Tooele City Police Department, said although the Timpie Road skate park and the Dow James skate park suffer from repeated taggings, which usually take place overnight, problems at the parks aren’t disproportionately worse than other areas in town.

“Yes we see graffiti, but is it out of the realm of what we see everywhere else?” Wimmer said. “No. Graffiti is everywhere. We have areas that are just as bad or worse.”

Wimmer said complaints about gang activity near skate parks probably stem from residents witnessing a gathering of juveniles and the appearance of graffiti — neither of which point directly to gang activity. Police have also not heard of possible drug deals going on in the area.

“Very little of the graffiti is gang-affiliated,” Wimmer said. “What is gang activity? Gang activity in our world is crimes committed by documented gang members. We don’t have any evidence of there being a gang set up in that area and using that park as their turf. As far as drug deals going on, if residents are witnessing drug deals, they need to call police and provide a statement. We have a drug task force that will follow up on that crime. If you are watching drug deals go down and you are not calling the police, then you are not doing your part.”

All the same, officers are stepping up patrol near the skate parks during evening hours to help curb reported activity.

“We are sending an officer down around 10 p.m. to see if people have vacated the park,” Wimmer said. “The vast majority of people showing up to use the skate park are there to skate. They are there to enjoy their friends or family, but it doesn’t seem to matter what you’re doing or what you’ve organized, there is always going to be a handful of bad apples creating a negative spin on it.”

Problems connected to the skate parks locally can be quickly reversed if more parental involvement were present, according to Chris Escobedo, owner of Grinders skate shop on Tooele’s Main Street.

“Any time you get a large congregation of adolescents, you are going to have some problems unless you have a parental authority to break up problems,” Escobedo said. “We held a skate demo at the Dow James Park a little while ago and there were probably 100 kids there and maybe only 20 parents. One of the kids that got hurt was 9 and he was just dropped off at the park. I would really rather see more parental involvement.”

Englehard said he and fellow skaters would fully support the installation of a fence around the park, which would perhaps help deter taggers and curb other problems associated with after-hours loitering.

“At the skate park in Sandy they put up a fence so they can lock it up at night, and since then the graffiti has pretty much gone away,” he said. “They should do the same thing at our park.”

Pruden said the city council has yet to decide how to respond to citizens’ complaints regarding the Timpie park.

“It’s an important thing to try to balance everything out,” he said. “If everyone works together we can come to a good conclusion.”

Jamie Belnap: jamieb@tooeletranscript.com