Skateboarding News

Dallas park proponents look to voters for new skate park venues

Dallas skateboarder, looking for a place to land.

Photo by Daniel Cavazos

Fans of classic Boomer rock like the Rolling Stones and Fleetwood Mac and the dulcet tones of the Offspring and Blink 182 will join hands on the Dallas bond election in May.

The former is the domain of the crew that embraces pickleball, while the latter is more favored by those who love skateboarding. As things stand right now, the city’s parks and recreation ask for projects and improvements is $399 million, which includes $2.5 million for three skateparks, as well as $10 million for racquet facilities, which today simply means pickleball.

One finalized, the bond proposal is expected to come in at around $1 billion, broken into requests by city departments. Voters will vote on each separately. The bond project specifics will be finalized by January at the latest.

Some parks projects may drop off the list. But District 14 Park and Recreation Board member Rudy Karimi is bullish on his own passion project, a small skate park at the 14-acre Glencoe Park, just off I-75 and south of Mockingbird, a 15-minute walk from SMU’s campus.

UPDATE 1-15-2024: The Glencoe skatepark is no longer in the works. According to a Facebook post from Karimi, "After several community town halls, tons of your advocacy, and weeks of thinking about what to do next, the Dallas Park and Recreation Department and I have decided to eliminate the Glencoe skate amenity from the recommendations proposed for the 2024 bond. The $500,000 that was recommended for this small skate amenity will remain for a skate amenity, but moved to a park outside of council district 14 to be named later."
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Skaters, Karimi says, “are part of an underserved demographic” that runs between 13 and 18 years old.

"If they aren’t into tennis, pickleball or basketball, our parks don’t have anything for them," he says.

The proposed skate park allocation of $2.5 million – and remember, these figures and projects have not yet been finalized – would include $500,000 for the Glencoe Park project; $1 million for a skate park in Westmoreland Park in Oak Cliff; and $1 million to renovate the city’s lone skate park at Lakeland Hills, which opened in 2007.

While skate parks in the U.S. are relatively easy to find, Karimi contends that the city of Dallas, with only Lakeland Hills, has an “atrociously low” number of parks. Skaters can head to the north suburbs – Plano, Allen, and Frisco all have parks – but Dallas kids have no options.

Glencoe, he says, sits in a spot surrounded by over 1,000 homes that are within a 10-minute walk. The skate area would use part of an existing baseball field that most insist is rarely used, since sandlot baseball – the game sans adult supervision - has gone the route of the typewriter.

The skaters would be served in much the same way pickleballers have being served by the replacement of tennis courts at Cole Park.

“That park used to have eight full-sized tennis courts, but last year they took two out and put in six pickleball courts,” Karimi says. There are plans to take up more tennis courts in favor of pickleball space.

There's already a precedent for bond money funding a skatepark in Dallas: A skate park is under construction at Bachman Lake and will come online next year. It's being built with funds from the 2017 parks bond, approved by voters as a package but funded indirectly from discretionary money.

Which will make the request for skate parks a de facto referendum on recreation, as well as generation. The parks and rec pitch will likely be wrapped together, as it was in 2017, when voters okayed a $261 million outlay for parks department projects.

As assistant Parks and Recreation director Christina Turner-Noteware stated in September regarding the Parks and Recreation Department's request for parks projects in the 2024 bond: "Our $399,000,835 request is not a wish list ... it's a true list of needs," she said.

Movie Review

Animated Disney film Elio is fun but falls short of Pixar top tier

Photo courtesy of Pixar

Elio (Yonas Kibreab) and Glordon (Remy Edgerly) in Elio.

Pixar has done a ton of different things in the 28 feature films they’ve released over the past 30 years, but the one they’d never done is deal with aliens (and, no, the alien toys in Toy Story don’t count). Now they’re going where many storytellers have gone before, but in their own unique way, in the new film Elio.

Elio (voiced by Yonas Kibreab) is a space fanatic who has recently lost both of his parents in an unnamed event. His Aunt Olga (Zoe Saldaña) is now his guardian, and because she happens to be a member of the U.S. Space Force, Elio finds himself tantalizingly close to communications from space. With a desire to be abducted by aliens for both curiosity and sentimental reasons, Elio sends a message into space, hoping for some kind of response.

He gets that and more when a ship full of multiple types of beings takes him into space, believing him to be a leader instead of a child. An encounter with a hostile force led by Lord Grigon (Brad Garrett) gives Elio both a new friend, Grigon’s son Glordon (Remy Edgerly), and responsibility for maintaining peace during an unexpected galactic crisis.

Pixar has not typically followed the route of many Disney movies of giving their child protagonist the trauma of dead parents, and doing so here is the first of a few minor missteps. Having Olga be his mom instead of his aunt would have altered their dynamic, but only slightly. While Elio is shown to miss his parents, his major focus is on making contact with aliens. Since the film only briefly deals with his grief, it would have been better served by excising it altogether.

For the most part, the film is goofy, with Elio’s enthusiasm for aliens matched by the oddness of the creatures he meets in space. The filmmakers - there are three credited directors and three credited writers - seem to have taken inspiration from sea creatures and Pixar’s own history, as the main bad guy emulates Mike and Sully’s boss from Monsters, Inc. Almost every character in the film is heightened to a degree that makes for funny situations, but not as much sentimentality as other Pixar offerings.

Surprisingly, especially since the film ends with a voiceover from notable astronomer Carl Sagan, the filmmakers play fast and loose with real-life science. Elio’s journeys to and from the alien spaceship are treated as close-to-instantaneous trips, even involving portals directly to Earth. The idea of the story doesn’t allow them to delve into things like relativistic time dilation, but there still could have been other scientific references to keep the story aboveboard.

There are very few stars to be found among the film’s voice cast other than Saldaña and Garrett, who are each fine if unmemorable. Kibreab and Edgerly are given many more scenes than anyone else, and they each do a great job of bringing out both the joy and naivete of their characters. Some lesser-known actors like Jameela Jamil, Atsuko Okatsuka, and Brendan Hunt show up in minor roles, but they don’t stand out in any way.

The story and characters in Elio are sweet and fun, but the film as a whole falls well short of the top tier Pixar movies. The filmmakers could have gone many different directions with a story about a boy who wants to be abducted by aliens, and the way they chose ended up being innocuous and less than compelling.

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Elio opens in theaters on June 20.

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