If time spent attending City Council meetings could be translated into the time a skateboarder spends airborne during a single move, Brent Hurta would be as famous as Tony Hawk.

Hurta is no Pflugerville City Council member nor is he a city staffer. He is no land developer or anyone doing business with the City Council at the moment.

If this were a skateboard event, Hurta would be at the point where the competitor eyes the lay of the land just before dropping his board and pushing forward, or at least that is his hope. Hurta is a private citizen and does have an agenda – he wants a skatepark built in Pflugerville.

He for years has regularly attended council meetings, just to speak in favor of a skatepark, even though the council knows just by seeing him that he is in favor of one being built locally. And he has caught their attention, not with fancy moves or showmanship but with his sheer diligence.

And by focusing on waiting his turn to speak, he has given the skatepark a real possibility of leaping to life. Auguste Rodin once said, “Patience is also a form of action,” and whether Hurta knows it or not, he has become an activist, and one many of us could stand to emulate.

The Pflugerville City Council is reportedly ready to consider a plan to build the skatepark. Mayor Pro Tem Victor Gonzales, in an April 8 Pflag article by James Rincon, said he believes building a skatepark is feasible, but how to get it completed needs to be figured out.

But, now that Hurta has made it to this stage, the lay of the land could be rather unnerving.

Skateparks have in the past been criticized by many, although often times the criticism seems to be borne out of general disdain for skateboarders. In this day and time, the hope is that unnecessary discrimination against others because of the way they dress or look will not surface, but we are, in this day and time, likely to see just that.

And if the City Council is to take the plunge into the skate bowl, they are bound to hear the “not in my neighborhood” comments that generally arise with projects of even the mildest of controversy. They will likely have to field questions at least about nighttime lighting, noise and hours of operation, if not about crime.

It’s difficult to discern whether building a skatepark would decrease or increase local crime, but it seems unlikely giving people a place to enjoy their pastime would cause them to run amuck.

But as far as the interest level goes, Hurta is quite unlikely to be the only local resident using it. Advocacy group Skaters for Public Skateparks cited an estimated 9.3 million Americans skateboarding at least twice a week in 1998, and the numbers are unlikely to have dipped much since then, if at all. Do millions of Americans play racquetball nowadays?

Nearby Round Rock was able to get its skatepark years ago, although late last year picket signs littered the area in front of Clay Madsen Recreation Center, where the skatepark is located. Notably, however, the protests came over the lack of a crosswalk in the area and not about the skatepark itself.

Hurta, however, faces his largest opposition in the form of the national economy. Pflugerville has managed to avoid many of the economic troubles seen across the country, but skateparks have been known to cost millions, if not hundreds of thousands, and that fact alone could leave skatepark advocates hanging for years to come.

– Marcial Guajardo