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Up to $1 million to be spent on new Glenroi skate park
June 20, 2022
By Peter Holmes
For years the kids of Glenroi have had to make their way across to John Lomas Skate Park, next to the Moulder Park Velodrome, via busy thoroughfares including Endsleigh Avenue and Churchill Avenue, before crossing the bridge over the railway tracks, across Peisley Street, down Franklin Road and finally onto Anson Street.
From his home in Warrendine, Orange deputy mayor Gerald Power has long seen them whizzing by on skateboards, bikes and scooters on their way down to the skate park.
“Every year you see those kids coming back and forth, and now they don’t have to travel, this will be part of their community here,” Power tells The Orange News Examiner.
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Power is milling about early on Monday morning on Glenroi Oval with Orange City Council staff, a youth worker, representatives from the Cadia mine and a pair of young students.
Using the small skate park already on Glenroi Oval as a base, council and Cadia are splitting the bill on a $220,000 skate park.
And that’s just the start of it.
Council’s director of community, recreational and cultural services, Scott Maunder, is carrying a wodge of possible designs of the first and subsequent stages of the skate park. He points out where raised take-off points, humps, rails, walls and turnaround points could be placed.
He explains that the park will be built in a way that makes it easy to add sections as more money becomes available.
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The first $110,000 from council is coming from its cash reserves, however subsequent construction at the skate park site will require the council to successfully apply for state and federal grants. Council said the completed skate park would cost "about $1 million".
Ultimately, local children will have a big say in the design of the new skate park, Maunder says.
Community consultation will take place at the Orange Youth Hub, which fronts the oval, and with people who use the John Lomas Skate Park facility.
He says the skate park will be put to tender and work should commence in about three months, with the job taking about two months. He adds the essential Orange caveat: “Weather permitting.”
“Glenroi has always been screaming for an opportunity,” says deputy mayor Power.
“This is where the benefit will be. It’s close to Glenroi, the children; we’ve got the Glenroi Heights school so close, the community hub here, Marang Gunya Community Centre up the road.”
An expanded skate park was included in the Glenroi Oval Master Plan, which was adopted by
Orange City Council in 2020 for the enhancement and development of the area.
Cadia’s head of operations Thomas Lethbridge told The Orange News Examiner that the skate park application for a grant as part of the mining company’s Legacy Fund, “ticked all the boxes, particularly in the health space”.
“And it leaves a nice legacy in the area where our people live and operate,” he said.
The council masterplan includes a new $170,000 playground, new amenities block and barbecue facilities.
The single basketball court will be replaced by two courts, and they will face north-south rather than east-west (the latter causes issues as the sun rises and sets).
“I don’t know why that was put in east-west,” Maunder says, mildly bemused.
Helmets and protective pads are required at skate parks, however they are not patrolled.
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