Beckley Raleigh County Parks and Rec plans to build new skate park and other new recreational opportunities

BECKLEY, WV (WOAY) – Following the celebration of paying off the $3 million-dollar Historic Black Knight Municipal Park, the City of Beckley is ready to start moving forward with new objectives, the first being some new recreational plans in the works.

“We’ve been discussing this for over a year now and the plans are still very early in their developmental stages, it’s a very big project, it’s something we really want to do, we are just finishing up some other parks,” says Leslie Baker, Director of Beckley Parks and Rec.

Following the completion of these, the city hopes to build a new skate park to replace the almost 20-year-old Freedom Skate Park on Eisenhower, as Parks and Rec Director Leslie Baker says that it isn’t up to the modern standard of skateparks today.

“Skating has really advanced and the skatepark is a little antiquated and there are some upgrades and total renovations that we would like to do. Skateparks today are made of 100-percent concrete and our park has a lot of metal pipes and metal elements, we’ll get rid of all of those and hopefully, our park will be a brand new concrete park.”

In addition to the making of a new skatepark, Parks and Rec. also hopes to add other future recreational amenities, including a recreational center and a “Gateway” park.

“Parks and Rec aren’t an essential service like fire or police protection, but we like to think of ourselves as the heart of the community, we have all of the really fun amenities, educational amenities, outdoor activities for our community, so we just like to upgrade everything and bring everything we can to our citizens,” she says.

While exciting, all of these new recreational opportunities are still very early in the planning phase and will be extensive projects that have yet to have any solid date of building or completion.

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