Officials in a California city filled a skate park with 37 tons of sand to keep skateboarders away during the coronavirus pandemic.
Parks in San Clemente were shut down across the state starting April 1, but skateboarders and others in the city ignored warnings against using the skate park. Officials responded by dumping 37 tons of sand into the park last week.
“The sand was what other agencies were doing. We’re doing what other parks have done to enforce that message of social distancing,” Samantha Wylie, the city’s recreation manager for the Beaches, Parks and Recreation Department, said.
A nonprofit organization that has been raising money to support the park while it’s closed was not pleased with the decision and said it wasn’t warned the park was going to be filled with sand.
“There’s a lot of people within our community who have put a lot of time and money, personal money … to the skate park,” Stephanie Aguilar, president of the San Clemente Skatepark Coalition, said. “That visual representation of the city dumping sand into the skate park, it almost feels like, when you look at it, the city vandalized its own park, and I think it pains people to see it.
“Social distancing hasn’t been followed in a lot of different areas, whether it’s on our trails, tennis courts, the basketball courts, the walking paths; we didn’t see the city dump sand on the walking trail,” Aguilar continued. “We didn’t see them dump sand onto any other sport area that’s being used. It just plays into, kind of feeds into that double standard the skate community has been treated with.”
