Two Heber City juveniles responsible for the recent destruction of public property at Southfield Park were identified late last week by the Heber City Police Department.
The update came a day after Wasatch County Parks and Recreation decided to indefinitely close Southfield Park’s skate park last Wednesday following the latest vandalism in the park’s bathroom, this time within 72 hours since it had been repaired from previous incidents.
Heath Coleman, the department’s assistant director, said the skate area will be reopened but vandals have cost the county an estimated $75,000 over the past 18 months and it was time to regroup.
“Myself, our team and Parks and Rec, and our board members — which are County Council members — and our chairman talked on the phone yesterday and we decided yesterday to close the skate park until further notice, until we can get a plan to move forward on how we can curve this,” he said. “Within a couple hours, we received some anonymous tips.”
He said the last year and a half has brought an uptick of vandalism and graffiti to the skate park itself as well as the restroom. Within the last year, he said he and his crew have had to rebuild the men’s and women’s facilities several times. He believes the park was targeted for a TikTok challenge to destroy public restrooms.
It started with smaller acts of theft — stealing paper towels and soap dispensers — before things became more serious.
“It got to more egregious stuff of actually smashing all of our urinals, our toilets, our sinks, tearing our partitions off the wall and destroying those,” Coleman said. “That would happen regularly, on top of things like tagging.”
Lighting fires or fireworks also become a common occurrence within the abused restroom.
“Late last fall, we got hit really hard. Totally destroyed the restrooms, complete destruction,” he said. “My crew spent a good part of the winter building our own partitions out of some heavy gauge steel so they couldn’t destroy them as easy. We invested in stainless steel toilets, and crews just got done finishing installing everything last Friday.”
The public employees’ hard work did not last long. Another sink had been demolished, and the skate park had been tagged.
More graffiti and vandalism has been found in the skatepark area than any other areas of the park. So they decided to temporarily close that portion of the park off to the public.
“Basically, what we’re trying to do is to create community awareness,” he explained. “This isn’t punishment for the skate park community.”
Along with the two kids identified for the recent acts of vandalism, Sever said Master Officer T.C. Thomas’s investigation led him to several names of other juveniles at the park.
“He’s going to be giving them trespass notices,” Sever said. “The officer did a really good job investigating.”
Coleman also said there will be a community meeting on May 1 at 7 p.m. at the community recreation center to bring the public into the conversation of how to counter the repeated vandalism and graffiti.
Heber Police Chief Parker Sever said that throughout his career as a law enforcement officer, he’s noticed that vandalism and graffiti are often commonplace at skate parks.
Stopping the issues happening in the bathroom could be tricky, he said.
“You obviously can’t put cameras in the bathroom,” he said. “In order to be effective at that, you would literally have to go into the bathroom every time somebody exited to see if the conditions changed, or identify everybody that left the bathroom at the end of the day, then interview all those people.”
Neither option, he clarified, is very realistic.
Some successful efforts he’s seen in other places to reduce this kind of criminal activity would be changing the layout of the bathroom to just one stall with sinks outside, or necessitating that people using the skate park check in through a main door.
Coleman said the Parks and Recreation Department is tentatively looking to reopen the skate park next week and is hoping for public input.
“We try and tell these kids and parents, we’re on their team and we want to be a part of a solution of an ongoing problem,” he said. “Make it a safe, inviting environment for kids and families to come and enjoy.”
