The 5th annual Bike and Skate Challenge will be held tomorrow, September 6, at the Soldotna Skate Park from 1 pm to 4 pm.
Senator Peter Micciche detailed the reason he started this annual event.
Micciche: “We were having some trouble at the mall, some kids with bikes and skateboards were negatively interacting with some folks when they would get chased away from businesses, and I hate to put it this way but after dropping enough F-bombs on folks’ grandmothers, I went and gathered them together and said I want to talk about this guys. The deal we made was if they would stop that negative interaction and began to using more and more of their talents at the skate park I would invest in them, one of the things that I promised to do were these bike and skate challenges and if you think about it that first year there were over 80 police reports, calls, at the mall, that number steadily went down until two summers ago we had zero reports, so they’ve lived up to their end of the deal, these are good kids, they have talents, they have athleticism that people should come and enjoy.”
Micciche said he empathized with those kids because he skated in high school and despite being a straight A, well-behaved teen, he experienced the stigma attached to the sport.
