Encinitas Considers Putting the Brakes on Skateboarders

On most weekdays, but especially on Thursdays, they converge on the sidewalks of downtown Encinitas with a cacophonous clatter.

Clunka-clunka-clunka-clunka-clunka-clunka.

It’s the almost-rhythmic, restless patter of polyurethane wheels on concrete.

These days, most merchants don’t even bother to gaze outside store windows at the source of the racket--at the hoots, the hollers or the “Hey, dudes.”

Because they know the skateboard boys are back in town.

They’re called rippers--local teens dressed in baggy shorts and backward baseball hats or black skull caps, tie-dyed T-shirts and tiny earrings. At 2:30 p.m.--moments after classes let out at nearby San Dieguito High School--they appear on city street corners with skateboards in hand like four-wheeled, bumper-stickered, psychedelic briefcases.

And they mean business. Often dozens at a clip, they roll through downtown intersections in search of the angles. The steep, jarring curb. The gently sloping drive. Or those lumpy concrete parking lot logs.

Anything that gives them air time. Or the perfect opportunity for a Rail Slide or an Ollie Grab. Any city streetscape that can turn a hunk of laminated wood into wings for the feet.

“It’s a rush when you do a semi-hard trick,” said 15-year-old Jaimz Grafton, describing the emotional high of skateboarding hang-time. “You know, things like going down stairs or climbing a wall.”

But skateboarders aren’t the only ones climbing walls. A number of downtown businessmen complain that the rippers are getting a bit too reckless--dashing between cars, scarring concrete abutments and plowing past pedestrians.

Next week, the Encinitas City Council will consider whether it will join the ranks of cities across California and nationwide who regulate and even ban skateboarding in certain downtown areas.

“We’ve got lots of complaints about these boys,” Encinitas Mayor Gail Hano said. “People are writing letters. Merchants have asked me to come to their storefront parking lots to look at the damage. These kids are getting on people’s nerves. They jump on top of steps and things and rock back and forth. They’re breaking things up.”

The San Diego County Sheriff’s Department, which provides law enforcement for Encinitas and several other North County cities, has been directed to research how other cities handle the popular teen-aged practice.

There’s no shortage of laws to review. According to statistics from the California League of Cities, at least 60 cities statewide regulate the practice in downtown business districts. Four others--all in Northern California--ban skateboarding outright.

Several local cities--including Vista, Lemon Grove, Escondido, Riverside and San Diego--either regulate or ban skateboarding in downtown areas.

But strict laws are not confined to California--where the sport has flourished since it evolved in the 1960s when youths devised an alternative to surfing.

In Issaquah, Wash., for example, reckless skateboarders face fines of up to $250 under a 1985 ordinance. And to cut down on rowdy riders in Rossman, N.C., aldermen in 1988 passed a law requiring youths to have a driver’s license or be supervised by a licensed adult.

Years ago, such bad press prompted Santa Cruz Skateboards, among the largest manufacturer of skateboarding equipment, and Transworld Skateboarding magazine to distribute hundreds of thousands of bumper stickers bearing the message: “Skateboarding Is Not a Crime.”

Now, in light of several new anti-skateboarding laws--including one passed last month in Huntington Beach--organizers say they will soon begin reissuing the bumper stickers.

Dave Swift, associate editor of the Escondido-based Transworld Skateboarding magazine, says officials in Encinitas are only the latest to show a misunderstanding of a sport that has long captivated the California youth culture.

“They’re hurting the kids because they’re taking away their sport and they’re not giving anything back,” he said. “Would they suddenly plow under all the baseball fields in town without giving the kids a place to go? I don’t think so.”

More youths are injured each year playing sandlot baseball than skateboarding, said Swift, whose magazine has a worldwide circulation of 175,000. “These people are just afraid of the sport because they don’t understand it,” he said.

“They’re always coming up with all these claims about old ladies being knocked to the ground. Well, I don’t think that really happens. And all these claims about sidewalks or steps being damaged. How do you ruin concrete?”

Francine Chandler doesn’t see it that way. She’s the manager of a downtown Encinitas massage center that has had a long-running battle with the sometimes 40 teens that gather on some weekdays outside her door.

“Every time I try to talk to them, I get the same results,” she said. “They’re rude. They’re disrespectful. And they’ll run you over if you wanna play chicken with them on the street.”

Chandler is one of a handful of Encinitas businesses who want to post “No Skateboarding” signs on their properties. “I’m through trying to talk with them,” she said, “and being told to go take a flying leap.”

Jaimz Grafton is too busy taking flying leaps of his own to bad-mouth any businessmen, he says. The high school sophomore, who wears a silver earring, sees it as his lawful right to use downtown streets for skateboarding.

For Grafton and the other boys, skateboarding has become a way of suburban life. And a legitimate mode of transportation around the North Coutny coastal city. Most rippers forsake the school bus--instead, carrying their boards to classes each day.

Although they can’t ride them on school grounds, it’s cool to be seen with a skateboard, they say. After all, surfers haven’t carved out all the golden-boy glory.

When the last school bell rings, the teens usually congregate outside La Petite Boulangerie, a downtown Encinitas pastry shop that the rippers say has the best curbs in town.

Often, they wax down the edges to make it easier for Rail Slides--a move in which they glide along the curb on the middle of their boards. They do Ollie Grabs, in which they launch the board skyward with their back feet and grab onto it in the air.

The older boys are usually the better boarders. But they teach the young dudes, the junior high schoolers, the tricks of the sport. Some have even shown their younger sisters some slicker moves.

“That’s so huge,” one teen will say as an older rider pulls off a 360-degree Kick-Flip--a move in which he turns his board over in the air while launching into a complete off-the-ground circle.

If they get chased from La Petite, the boys roll on down to a nearby coastal shopping mall or bank parking lot--an army of skateboards clattering past shops and parked cars. On some days, the group can be found five miles away at an inland shopping mall. How do they get there? On their boards, of course.

“It takes us about a half hour to get there,” said 16-year-old Dan Cornaggia, a high school sophomore with a mouthful of braces. “That’s if we’re going downhill, though. Going uphill is tough.”

There’s other teen-aged rippers in the group. There’s Kyle Jester, who wears a black skull cap as a contrast to his white T-shirt. There’s Brent Emery, who wears a New York Yankees baseball cap. And Mike Fraustein, who has a long blond ponytail. And Mike Lees, a clean-cut teen with a hint of a goatee gracing his chin .

They’ve all got scraped elbows and knees from daring tricks that somehow went awry. And they’ve got something else in common. They ride their boards constantly--seven days a week--40 or 50 hours.

Their parents all support their skateboarding habit because it means they’re not out doing drugs or making real trouble, they say. Or just sitting home watching television or playing mindless Nintendo games.

But these young rippers just can’t understand the anger their suburban sport has aroused. They can’t fathom why so many old-timers--the “gumps” and “jerks”--hurl insults as they roll by, why some throw rocks at them, or why one irate driver came at them with a crowbar.

And they can’t understand the police reaction. Last February, they say, 10 rippers were detained by deputies for riding on school grounds. Some were taken home in patrol cars after being ticketed for defiance, they say.

Jay Vestal, a 16-year-old with a shock of closely cropped red hair, said one deputy stopped him outside a shopping mall recently and threw his skateboard in a trash can after handcuffing him in the back seat of a patrol car.

One night, the rippers say, deputies forced them to line up against the wall at another shopping mall popular with riders. “They took down all this real important information about us,” Grafton says facetiously. “Stuff like our addresses, our eye color, what color our bedrooms are painted. How big our feet were.”

San Diego County Sheriff’s Capt. Bob Apostolos says he will enforce any law the City Council decides to pass in Encinitas. But deep down, he says, as he watches certain freedoms erode--such as less and less access to supposedly public beaches--his heart lies with the skateboarders.

“But now that we’re becoming so populated, there’s less and less tolerance for such behavior,” said Apostolos, who was raised in Southern California. “It’s a sad thing. Maybe society is encroaching on the rights of these kids.

“Because Southern California is such a great place to play. But from their perspective, they’re being told all the time that there’s fewer and fewer places where they’re being allowed to play.”

Young Mike Fraustein says all the tension is over what the skateboarders call the two Ls--lawsuits and liability. “They’re only worried about money,” he said.

Not if you talk to Abbott Davidson. On a recent weekday, the Encinitas furniture salesman looked out of his store window at a dozen skateboarders and sighed.

“I’m more concerned about their safety,” he said. “On Saturdays, it’s unbelievable the numbers of kids we get out there. And that’s when the cars are also packed into the lot.”

Then he stopped and pointed. “Look how fast that car is bolting through here. I don’t think he evens sees those kids.”

Jaimz Grafton admits that one moment of lost concentration can cost a ripper. Like the day he ran into the front bumper of a moving car when he crossed a street without looking.

But the bottom line, the rippers say, is that they’re not hoodlums. They don’t deface valuable property. And if city officials are going to ban skateboarding, couldn’t they at least build them a skate park or an alternative place to go?

And while it wouldn’t provide the adventure of a skateboard ride down some unfamiliar city street, they say, at least they could skate someplace without all the hassles and hateful looks.

If only, they say, all adults were as cool as Dana Stieber.

The manager at the La Petite pastry shop has never chased them away from her store--her regional manager takes care of that when he pays a visit.

Instead, the 33-year-old Steiner talks with the rippers. If too many congregate out front, she asks them to come back at 5 p.m., after the store closes.

For Steiner, the skateboarders are a mirror image of herself as an active Southern California teen who grew up in search of a place where the adult world would just leave her alone.

Sadly, she says, she never found it. And in light of the new anti-skateboarding ordinance she predicts will probably soon be passed, she knows that these kids haven’t either.

“I don’t know--I just get a kick out of watching them,” she says. “They do so many nifty things with those boards. Who knows, maybe one day we’ll have a skateboarding event in the Olympics and these kids’ll compete in it.

“At least I can say I did my part to see that they got really good.”