SEQUIM — An Eagle Scout project creating an outdoor cabinet to store safety helmets on loan at Sequim Skate Park is more than an air-riding success.
All eight helmets stored there beginning Saturday for skateboarders’ use are gone.
“Not only are they using them, we no longer have any,” said Jeff Edwards, city of Sequim Public Works parks coordinator.
Edward said he hopes to buy more helmets and have the cabinet at the skate park in Carrie Blake Park on Blake Avenue restocked early next week.
Edwards worked with Boy Scout Troop 90’s Matthew Cays, an Eagle Scout candidate who with other volunteer Scouts and friends built the “helmet box” with $300 in donations from local businesses and others.
The new cabinet, which was dedicated last Saturday, contained eight skater helmets donated by Mike’s Bikes in Sequim.
Edwards said this week he came upon one skater who took the helmet out of the box, used it, then went home with it.
He believes others have done the same.
And that’s OK.
“I gave him $20 for using it,” Edwards said.
Although skate park users are supposed to return helmets to the box after use, Edwards has no problem with them taking them.
“If it was a concern about theft, we never would have done this,” Edwards said, but he added that “the whole idea is to borrow them and give them back so others can use them.”
Edwards said he was just glad he did not find the helmets vandalized or tossed into the bushes somewhere around the park.
He said he needs more donations for helmets that were bought from Mike’s Bikes in Sequim for a discount.
At the dedication Saturday, Cays, a 17-year-old Sequim High School junior — with the help of Mayor Ken Hays — drilled the final screws into a plaque donated by Peninsula Awards on Saturday.
It states: “In memory of fallen skaters . . . Dedicated to protect the future one.”
At the time the plaque was made, Cays said Frank Russo, the 14-year-old helmet-less Port Angeles skater who died from a head injury he suffered in the bowl at the Port Angeles Skate Park in June 2006, was on his mind.
“When we thought of the plaque, the thoughts were with him,” Cays said shortly after his Eagle Scout project was declared complete.
The young Russo, the age of many skaters at the Sequim Skate Park — built in 2000, the first such recreational facility on the North Olympic Peninsula — was the only youth to die that way.
Today, besides the Sequim and Port Angeles skate parks, there is another in downtown Port Townsend.
Cays, the son of Brian and Cathy Cays and another generation of the Sequim-area pioneer family, was joined by a number of business and community supporters to dedicate the paint-splattered cabinet project.
“This was his project, but he has worked on a number of service projects,” said Cays’ Troop 90 Scoutmaster, Karl Wood, who has had a connection in or with Scouting since he was a Cub Scout in 1971.
Wood has led the troop for the past six years, overseeing 64 Scouts since and 21 today.
Those projects have included painting over graffiti at the skate park and maintenance work in Olympic National Park, said Wood, who provided guidance to Cays to get the job done.
The troop is sponsored by Sequim Rotary and Sequim Trinity United Methodist Church, adjacent to the skate park off North Blake Avenue. To the north is Carrie Blake Park.
Paul Haines, city Public Works director, stood in for Edwards at the dedication.
Haines said then that the idea was to encourage skaters to use helmets at no cost.
“We’ve got a number of young men providing projects like this, and we’ve been cheering them on,” Haines said.
“We help make it possible so they can do it at a public park. The idea is to encourage young people to use helmets.”
He said the small dedication was a way to recognize Cays for the project that other Scouts in his troop contributed to, including David Vollenweider, Dillan Holcomb, Brice Wood, Caleb Gershon and Will Hays, the mayor’s son.
Staci Delabarre “and friends” helped raise $300 toward the project, and the Thomas Building Center gave a discount for wood and supplies.
Domino’s Pizza in Sequim donated pizza.
Putting that money to the test, Cays presented the first of future $50 gift certificates to Sequim Middle School sixth-grader TJ Olegniczak, donated by Olympic Mailing Services owner Caroline M. Stuckey, because he showed up on his scooter at the park wearing a helmet.
“If they come down and they wear a helmet, they get a gift certificate,” Cays said, adding that one donated by a different business will be given away monthly.
________
Sequim-Dungeness Valley Editor Jeff Chew can be reached at 360-681-2390 or at jeff.chew@peninsuladailynews.com.
