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CONTACT THE ENTERPRISE Jocelyn Robinson, News editor jrobinson@heraldnet.com

Skateboard? Pay up LFP Council says

By Amy Daybert
Enterprise editor

Skateboarding in Lake Forest Park will carry a $175 fine, the City Council decided at their Sept. 11 meeting.

The penalty for skateboarding on a roadway open to vehicular traffic was a misdemeanor before the council changed it to a civil infraction. Although the penalty was more severe as a misdemeanor, the law was difficult to enforce, police chief Dennis Peterson told council members. Juvenile courts do not take skateboard cases and so officers had little option but to continually warn offenders.

Peterson introduced an ordinance that set incremental amounts from $100 to $300 for violating the city's skateboard regulations on up to three separate occasions. After the first three infractions, the penalty would be a misdemeanor, he explained.

"Why should this be a misdemeanor when speeders and other similar types of infractions of traffic are not misdemeanors?" councilman Dwight Thompson said.

An offender must work their way up to a fourth offense before the penalty can be a misdemeanor, councilman Alan Kiest reasoned.

"We are modernizing something we're finding difficult to enforce and we're introducing quite a bit of leniency compared to our current code," he said.

If a speeder can be fined the same amount for repeatedly breaking a traffic law, regulations surrounding skateboarding within the city shouldn't be more complicated, Thompson argued.

"I think we need not be over legislating, over penalizing these types of things," he said. "A $175 ticket will get most people's attention. That's a chunk of change."

The motion to amend the ordinance and set a $175 fine for violating the city's skateboard regulations passed 3-2.

An ordinance to change the penalty for the violation of fireworks restrictions was delayed to the Oct. 9 meeting so absent council members Don Fiene and Catherine Stanford could weigh in on the issue.

"This is striking me as a matter of community values and that's why we have seven of us instead of only one or two of us," councilman Kiest said. "There are only five of us here tonight. I have no idea how the other two feel about this."

A proposed ordinance would change the city's penalty section of the fireworks law from a misdemeanor to a civil infraction for the first three offenses. The infraction would carry a monetary fine of $200 for the first offense; $300 for the second offense; and $500 for the third offense.