After almost a year of research, field trips and haggling with irate neighbors, the City’s Skate Park Advisory Committee just released its proposals for the Skatepark Plan last night. Read the full thing here (it’s 44 pages, but there’s lots of pictures). The report lays out locations of 26 skate parks the City should build and makes nine major suggestions for procedure the City should follow.

Topping the list are developing a city-wide criteria for siting skate parks and filling the gaps in the citywide skatepark system. They have some great ideas, I think, like making those kiddie wading pools around the city skateable during the winter and replacing benches in some areas with skate-resistant materials, turning places like Northgate transit center into a mini skatespot.

Just because the Skatepark Advisory Committee proposes these sites, though, doesn’t mean they’ll actually get built. The City currently has no funding allocated for construction or design, so the report identifies “community-funding resources.â€� And the Parks Department has their own, slightly different proposal — it cans the major District skate park at the West Seattle Stadium.

In light of the years of process and lack of hard funding, some people are giving up on working through city channels at all (see Marginal Way or yesterday’s PI article about the River City Skate Park). The Skate Park Advisory Committee itself is working on printing a “cookbookâ€� for getting a skate park built in your neighborhood d.i.y. style, without City process.

There’s a huge public hearing on the skate park proposal next Thursday night (December 14th) at 6:30PM at the Town Hall. NIMBYs, sk8rs, all invited.

Interested in reading more about the proposed locations and seeing the newest map? That, plus a vocab primer below the cut.

First, there are five types of skate sites proposed. One type is a "future park acquisition siteâ€�, which are sites that won't be available in the near future but should be kept on the back burner — like the Northgate Park and Ride, which might be a possibility within 15 years. These are the other four types:

Skate dots —20 square ft. — 1,500 and costing a maximum of $16,000 Skate spots — up to 10,000 square feet (or $64,000) which is the size of a tennis court District skate parks — up to 30,000 square feet (or $2 million) or roughly two tennis courts Regional skate parks — over 30,000 square feet and $2 million

And here's a map of the Advisory Committee's suggested locations:

That's really small and blurry, so click here for an actually readable map.

One of the most important requirements for skatepark planning is that they're equally distributed around the city, so they're accessible to kids without cars who don't want to spend hours on buses. To me, the planning looks a little lopsided in favor of skateparks in South Seattle. Check out the neighborhood tally:

NW: 3 skatedots
NE: 1 Regional, 1 skatespot, 3 proposed
Central West: 2 skatedots
Central East: 4 skatspots, 2 skatedots
SW: 2 district, 3 skatespots, 1 skatedot and one proposed
SE: 2 district and 2 skatespots

Four district skateparks below I-90 and none above... sure, there's the gargantuan regional skate park, but that's rather isolated out in Magnuson Park, whereas the district skate parks are well placed around south neighborhoods (one at West Seattle stadium, High Point Playfield, Rainier Beach Playfield and Genesee Playfield). In exchange, a lot more skatedots in the North, but those could be as small as 20 square feet (one bench next to a trail).

One of the hurdles to building skateparks is acquiring land — and that's cheaper and easier to come by in South Seattle than downtown, Capitol Hill and Queen Anne, which may help explain the more miniscule skate sites up in those neighborhoods.

But does size even really matter? Not to many street skaters who wouldn't use skate parks anyway. I just talked to some street skaters at the skateshop 35th North on 11th and E Pine who couldn't care less whether Capitol Hill gets skateparks but love the idea of skatedots, where they can legally skate on objects they'd normally be banned from.