A wonderful community of skateboarders living in this valley has inspired me to write this letter. I am a senior at Wood River High School who has been working to improve local skateboarding. I have always lived in this valley and believe skateboarders are given too much of a bad rap; of this, I am often reminded, but try to ignore.
According to Mark Oliver's "Skateboarding in the Wood River Valley" video, skateboarding started as an outlaw thing in Ketchum, out in front of the chamber. Slowly, Ketchum started to support skaters, and eventually helped to create the Guy Coles Skate Park. Hailey raised funds for its current park slightly faster than Ketchum, completing the concrete park about two years before the Guy Coles Skate Park. Currently, Hailey and Ketchum are my favorite parks, but I prefer Hailey and have been helping to improve the park.
I decided to create a design for the Hailey Skate Plaza expansion, part of the Hailey Rodeo Park project, for my senior project in an effort to improve the park. I created this design with one kind of skateboarding in mind—open-space, free-street skateboarding, a great place for all skaters, especially beginners.
I have been giving back to the local community as much as possible, because without its support and some of my wonderful, completely freethinking classmates of 2010, I do not know if I would have been pushed as hard to succeed in school. The help of their extra push has given me some amazing college options, and I could not be happier.
Please come out to the polls for the upcoming bond election on May 25. If some of my classmates want to vote for the first time, this upcoming bond election might be the perfect election for you. Or, if you are not a Hailey resident, you can find more information at www.haileyparks.org. I am working to give back to my community something it has given me, and I can be contacted through the high school for more information on Hailey skateboarding. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go skate.
PS: Sun Valley Co., thank you so much for everything you've done at Dollar this year. It's been much appreciated.
Gene Fairbrother
Hailey
