Construction on Turlock’s new skate park rolling forward

The early contours of Turlock’s future skate park can be see at Donnelly Park, where Canada geese are keeping an eye on its progress.

The long curving slope is just scraped earth now. A construction barrier carves out a swatch of park between the fenced playground area and the lake in the park’s southwest quadrant, where the future Brandon “Cookie” Koch Memorial Skate Park will lie.

When completed in the spring, the park will splay out in roughly a fan shape, with long tails of concrete providing a skatable path to the parking lot nearby.

It will have beginner and advanced skater areas, said landscape architect Craig Waltz, who co-designed the park with Zach Wormhoudt. The city of Turlock contracted with Wormhoudt Inc. of Santa Cruz to design the $240,000 park. California Skate Parks is doing the construction.

Large colored concrete cookies pay playful homage to the park’s namesake, one with a quarter pipe and a stack of chocolate chip wafers providing a drop ledge, Waltz said.

“That was a nickname of his, so we kind of ran with that,” he said. Koch’s family weighed in on the new design during two community meetings held in Turlock. Their son, an avid skateboarder, died at age 26 from cancer in 2012.

The final design incorporates (in skateboard lingo) kicker stairs, down ledges, handrails, a euro gap bank, quarter pipes and a three-flat-three, which is a pair of three-stair steps with a landing. It has pump bumps, a rolled feature skaters can use to pick up speed or change direction.

The open plan on a spit of land stretching out into the man-made lake allows a free flow of people, giving the relatively small, 6,000-square-foot skating area a larger feel. It also allows any flooding to quickly ebb away.

“We designed it so water could flow in and out of the park, so no drains are needed,” Waltz said.

The new park will include four small pieces recycled from the old skate park closed in August. That park sat between the old police headquarters and Turlock Irrigation District office at Canal Drive and Palm Street, where teens had carved and kickflipped since 2004.

Not much of the old park was usable, Waltz said. “It had really dated terrain. The spacing was wrong. The flow was terrible, and some of the features were actually dangerous,” he said.

The new design will be far safer, he said. “Maintaining safety is our No. 1 priority.”

California Skate Parks did not return a call seeking a finish date, but Waltz said a typical small park takes 120 days to build. That puts the opening some time around April.

This story was originally published December 30, 2015 at 5:39 PM with the headline "Construction on Turlock’s new skate park rolling forward."