Skate park advocates determined

A SKATE park in Kangaroo Flat remains just an idea, with no money for the long-running project included in the City of Greater Bendigo’s new budget.

But the suburb’s leading community group, the Kangaroo Flat Community Enterprise, is determined to continue the push for a park.

KFCE chair Geoff Bowyer has questioned the city’s priorities in allocating capital works funding.

“We’re not here to criticise council per se, just to question its priorities,” Mr Bowyer said.

“We will take a greater role in advocacy going forward when it comes to capital works projects.”

In 2017, the city agreed that a skate park was needed and even produced a final concept design in 2022, following community consultation. But since then, it has remained unfunded.

A statement from the City said the project was considered as part of budget deliberations for 2024 to 2025.

“Unfortunately, the number of projects competing for funding through the budget process is always over-subscribed with more projects than budget available,” it said.

“The skate park remains an important project for Kangaroo Flat and will be considered in future budgets as funding becomes available.”

But Mr Bowyer said a skate park was arguably a far greater priority than some other projects that received funding for this financial year.

He said a storage shed at the Gurri Wanyarra Wellbeing Centre, renewal of the sky lounge at Bendigo Stadium, renewal work at the Kangaroo Flat library and an upgrade to a caretaker’s cottage at the Bendigo Gas Works site were examples of projects to receive funding ahead of the skate park proposal.

Mr Bowyer argued that a skate park was more worthy than any of these.

He said he was confident most people would agree “the need for a skate park is overwhelmingly greater” than upgrades at the library.

“And a miniscule number of people would even know there is a caretaker cottage (at the Gas Works),” he said.

“We can’t just snap our fingers as a community and expect facilities to be magically built, but when something dates back to 2017…

“A skate park is an essential and urgent priority for the youth of Kangaroo Flat and we’ll certainly be advocating for that.

“We’ll have to have greater dialog with the new councillors that are coming in at the elections in October.”