The city of Nipomo expects to have a new skate park by late next year. It will have amenities other skating areas lacked.
Most sports are seasonal, but here on the Central Coast skating is an all-year sport.
"The closest skate park is Santa Maria or Grover, and for kids who don't drive that might as well have been one hundred miles away," said Mesa Skate Club Adviser, Tom Slater.
In 2015, many students at Mesa Middle School were interested in skateboarding and were looking to start a club. Teacher Tom Slater agreed to be their adviser.
Kids created make shift skate ramps where they used to skate behind Ace Hardware in Nipomo, but the privately owned piece of land was recently developed and the skate park is now gone.
"They started to express that they were getting in trouble because they were trespassing and there's nowhere to skate in Nipomo there's no skate park," said Slater.
The students were not yet old enough to drive to designated skate parks in surrounding cities so Slater took the students from Nipomo to the San Luis Obispo skate park, roughly a 20 minute drive.
But come next year, they may not have to travel far.
The park space next to the Nipomo Public Library will soon be transformed into a place where Nipomo youth can go to skateboard.
"It's a total of about a 1.5 million dollar project. About a million is coming from the parks public facility fees and about $500,000 is coming from the prop. 68 per capita grant," said San Luis Obispo County Parks and Recreation Senior Planner, Shaun Cooper.
This project has been in the works for years.
"We developed a master plan for Nipomo community park about 10 years ago and this is one of the features that was in the master plan," said Cooper.
Slater has been working to bring this project to life for years. He says the original skate club students have graduated high school at this point but are still interested in the project.
"They were in 7th or 8th grade and now they graduated from high school last year, some are in college. I still keep in touch with them through social media," said Slater.
Slater sends them updates from the county and explains what's going on and the progress they've made on the skate park. Many of the students from the original skate club still enjoy the activity.
"You know like they say if you build it they'll come, and I really believe that Nipomo is going to be a skate town once again," said Slater.
Construction is planned for next spring and it will likely be completed by the fall of next year.
