Listen up, skaters. As of today, skateboarding in the SW hills will get you a ticket after 10pm. Violating other road rules—like not having lights at night, running a stop sign, or riding in the wrong lane—could snag you a $115 ticket, unlike the city’s old $25 ticket.
These changes are part of the new skate ordinance city council passed today. It’s a compromise measure whittled far down from what some SW neighbors upset with skating on their streets previously put forward to council. In the spring, council weighed a plan that would have banned skating outright, on all days, all times, on 10 steep streets around Washington Park. Just a week ago, the revised ordinance included a mandatory all-ages helmet law for skaters.
Neither of those drastic measures made their way into the final version, which was hammed out by neighbors, the police, and city staff with much help and guidance from skaters Billy “Bones” Meiners and JP Rowan. The skaters involved in the process see this as a win that will improve the tense relationship between skaters and SW Portland residents. As Meiners said last week, “Skateboarders aren’t going to leave, but the least we can try to be respectful and not noisy. We have to work with the neighbors.”
It’s telling that only one person showed up at council today to testify about the new law and she was an Arlington Heights resident who wanted to voice her opposition to the stance of her neighbors that skating was dangerous and should be banned. When she sees the skaters zoom past her house, she told council, “I see the exuberance of youth, the joy of gravity.”
The final version was “hammed” out?
So.. Sarah Mirk is apparently the champion of local skaters whose refusal to even abide by the most basic of safety protocols in helmets shows all the intelligence of a 12 year old I’ll-never-be-a-victim-of-your-conformity type while continuing to engage in activities that simple physics and probability says will end badly for someone sooner then later.. since nearly every word about skateboarding in the Merc I have read has been by her.
Between this, the trying-WAAAY-too-fucking-hard-to-be-down-with-Oregon-just-give-it-up-you-will-ALWAYS-be-a-transplant “Oregon History Comics”, and her ABYSMAL coverage of San Diego comic con last year.. fucking seriously? You go to the biggest gathering of creators, fans, and consumers of genre entertainment in the WORLD and you focus on Portland writers who you could have done without having to leave your Wi-Fi routers radius of coverage? And an article on gentrification she wrote a while back where she called old timers people who moved in as far back as 2005. WOW! That’s like, an ice age ago in cool journalist years. I must be like.. a god or something, since my having moved to Alberta 15 years ago would put me as having existed before the dawn of time in her relative timespace.
I could go on, but I don’t want to spoil the rest of the chapbook. It’s called “Sarah Mirk: A Retrospective Of Hating The Most Infuriating Local Journalist I Have Ever Read” starting with her couple weeks taking over for Hall Monitor years back and culminating in her skate coverage. It will be available for on demand printing at Powells in a matter of days.
Mediocre, your comment above has absolutely nothing to do with the actual story and content of the article.
Fucking troll.