Painesville City Council voted 7-0 this week to approve about $237,000 in additional work at the city's skatepark, a package of bills covering everything from a freshly paved parking lot to design tweaks made mid-construction. The catch: most of the work was already done by the time council cast its vote on Monday.
The added costs include paving the Morse Avenue parking lot, a project the city handed to Ohio Paving for $80,000 after soliciting multiple bids, according to Cleveland.com. City Manager Doug Lewis told the outlet that officials had originally left out roughly $90,000 in optional construction work from the base contract with Catamount Skateparks, but decided to fold it back in once crews were already on site. Returning later to finish that work separately would have cost significantly more, Lewis said, and Catamount agreed to honor its original pricing for the add-ons.
The Painesville City Skatepark was planned for a site at Morse Park. Grindline Skateparks designed Phase 1, according to CitizenPortal's coverage of the city's bidding process.
Breaking Down the Extra Bills
Council's vote was required because the additional charges pushed spending more than 20% past the original base bid, triggering a mandatory approval step, the Cleveland.com report noted. All told, optional work and other additions to Catamount's contract, including roughly $30,000 in design changes, totaled about $121,000. Combined with the parking lot paving and other smaller costs, Phase 1 landed at about $661,000, just under the project's $662,000 budget.
City crews pitched in too, grading and seeding the ground around the skatepark and handling other site work, while the city separately purchased benches and garbage cans for the finished space. The same report notes that contractors have already received most of their payments, with council's latest vote authorizing the remaining bills and clearing the way for the city to collect its grant reimbursements.
Funding Stitched Together From Many Sources
Painesville hired Catamount Skateparks in May under a contract worth about $425,000, the figure confirmed in the city's own council minutes, which show the Vermont-based company's bid of $424,674. The skatepark project drew about $238,000 through the Ohio Department of Natural Resources Land and Water Conservation Fund, a federal-state matching grant that required the city to cover half the cost locally, according to the same municipal records and corroborated by GovTribe's summary of the award.
Lake County commissioners chipped in $150,000 in federal pandemic relief money, while the Painesville Community Improvement Corporation committed $30,000 and the Painesville Skateboard Association added $7,000, per Cleveland.com's reporting. City council minutes separately show the skateboard association's earlier contributions toward concept development and construction, reflecting a funding effort that braided together city tax dollars, state and federal grants, and years of grassroots fundraising.
A Twenty-Year Wait Finally Over
Planning for the new skatepark began in 2022, when the city started working with the Painesville Skateboard Association and the Community Improvement Corporation, groups that raised money and worked alongside local skateboarders and Grindline Skateparks to shape a design. Painesville's council minutes say construction bid documents were completed in March.
A flood in the Painesville area damaged or destroyed the skatepark at Kiwanis Recreation Park in summer 2007; it had been rebuilt and reopened at the same place by October 2008, according to the Concrete Disciples skatepark directory. The project later moved from Kiwanis to Morse Park, with pickleball among the possible uses for the old site.
