By Scott Taylor,Staff Writer

LEWISTON – The group of local skaters clamored around skate park designer Sam Batterson, telling him what they want in Lewiston’s new park.

Nothing could break their concentration – except Misty Bowden and her sign-up sheet.

“I’m looking for volunteers,” she said. “We need you to help us so we can pay for this thing.”

That did it.

“No way,” said Greene’s Frank Mikusevich, one of the group. “I’m allergic.”

Bowden walked away, no new names on the list in her hand. She wasn’t giving up on Mikusevich’s group, however.

“Oh, we know who they are,” she said. “They’ll all be getting phone calls.”

Josh Nagine, owner of Twin City Boarders, was even more blunt at Tuesday’s meeting.

“If you don’t help, we’ll make sure none of your ideas will get into the park,” he said.

Ideas and money – that’s the agenda for the skate park destined for Lewiston’s Kennedy Park for the next couple of months. The Skate Lewiston Auburn Movement hopes to raise a total of $269,000 by August. If its members do, they’ll begin four months of work and have the park finished just before the winter hits.

Members of the group presented their work so far to a group of about 42 Tuesday night at Lewiston High School. The group has collected $115,000 according to Pat Butler, a member of the group. That includes donations from local businesses and $30,000 from Empower Lewiston.

They’re still waiting for another $75,000 in corporate grants, but the rest is going to have to come from the skaters, their parents and friends.

Nagine said they’re sponsoring a bottle drive – they have an account set up at Roopers that will allow anyone to donate their bottle deposit slips toward the effort – a car wash and a garage sale. Other skaters will go to area businesses, trying to persuade them to support the effort.

“The rest of it is up to you, and whatever ideas you can come up with,” Nagine said.

Ideas

Skaters didn’t have many other fund-raising ideas, although several signed up for the bottle drive and car wash. But they did like designer Batterson’s preliminary sketches, and many had ideas of their own for features and obstacles.

Batterson’s design puts the park on 12,000 square feet of seamless concrete in Kennedy Park, along Park Street and north of swimming pool.

The southern third of the park would have a 9-foot-deep, canyon-like bowl, with steep walls for skaters to maneuver around. The rest features street-like obstacles – rails, curbs, ramps, benches, ledges and pyramids.

Tuesday, the skaters said they wanted to see more of that.

“That’s pretty typical of younger skaters,” Batterson said. “Kids like that stuff, because that’s what they show in the magazines. But when they get old and their knees get hurt, they’ll all be in the bowls.”

Batterson said he’d put together several design options, and Nagine said he’d have put them on display in his Main Street skate store. Skaters could stop by and vote for their favorites.