Excitedly lacing up her skates on a warm December afternoon, Jasmine Morales paused to reflect on the novelty of ice skating in the heart of her hometown.
“It’s rare,” she said. “It doesn’t happen often for people
in California. They can’t just go in their backyard and go ice skating.”
The 40-by-85-foot rink she was about to enter wasn’t quite in her backyard, but it was pretty close. Like an oasis in the desert, it beckoned her from the corner of Cook and Broadway, in front of the Town Center mall’s abandoned Gottschalk’s building.
As Morales and her friends tentatively took to the ice, holding fast to the sideboards and oftentimes to each other, they all agreed the ice was “slimier” than expected.
“It’s a lot like rollerblading, except it’s easier to fall,” observed one of her skating buddies. “You could call it ‘nasty rollerblading.’”
By all accounts, this winter’s inaugural “Mega Holiday on Ice” marks the first time in history the city has seen real outdoor ice skating, though it’s not an unprecedented event for the Central Coast. In 2007, the Clear Channel radio group sponsored a skating rink at Sunken Gardens in Atascadero, which ran for two weeks. Though it was a big hit with locals, it’s yet to return.
“The response was huge,” said Ed Carcarey of Mega
Radio 97.1 FM, sponsor for the Santa Maria rink. “The
public supported it a great deal. The problem is, it’s not the same economy it was three or four years ago, so this is a much harder thing to do.”
Though the city of Atascadero brought a synthetic rink back to Sunken Gardens in February, there’s just no substitute for the real thing for Carcarey, a Philadelphia native. He decided to play Santa Claus this time around, starting the process in July to bring an ice rink to the town he calls home.
The ice had its price; renting and building the rink ran up a more-than-$200,000 tab, Carcarey said.
“It’s astronomical,” he said of the project’s cost. “A lot of people have to get on board to pull something like this off. It doesn’t just happen.”
A group of local investors calling themselves the Santa Maria Venture Group, including Mega Radio and Santa Barbara Family Dentistry, came together to make the rink a reality. The coalition contacted a Texas company, Ice Rink Events, which installs temporary ice rinks all over the world. The company brought in all the necessary equipment and set up outside of the Santa Maria Town Center, which oversaw the power issues.
The city of Santa Maria’s Recreation and Parks Department contributed to the logistics and safety side, helping the investors get the necessary use permits and contracting out for construction of the rink’s sandbox foundation. The city also moved an operations trailer inside the rink area as a base for park rangers and security.
City recreation supervisor Dennis Smitherman said the city hopes to create an environment allowing for everyone to visit the ice rink and go skating at least once.
“Our goal this year was to provide an opportunity that otherwise hasn’t been available in our immediate area,” he said. “By assisting with the support for the ice rink, we’ve just created that opportunity.”
Rink installation began on Dec. 1, and, using a hose, crews applied one thin layer of ice at a time, like icing on a cake. It took five days to create enough to skate on. Keeping the ice from melting like a snowman in the sun is a 150-ton “chiller” that runs coolant under the rink at all times, fluctuating two to five degrees. Mega Radio’s Carcarey called the cooling costs “substantial.”
“You have to take a site that basically wasn’t built for an ice-skating rink and you have to set it up and still meet all the federal, local, and state regulations and ordinances,” Carcarey said. “That’s very expensive, especially here in California.”
At about a quarter of the size of a typical hockey rink, the ice can hold up to 127 people at one time. Orange-vested “skate guards” are on hand to help beginners get started with skating tips and rescue in case of falls. Guards reported no major injuries so far, except for one minor concussion. For the most part, they said, there’s been a steady stream of the curious since the rink’s grand opening on Dec. 10.
The rink has already been host to special fundraising events with the United Way—which received $1 from every ticket sold on Dec. 14—and Marian Medical Center, which paid for 22 visually impaired students from the Santa Barbara Education program to skate on Dec. 13. On Dec. 17, the United Way, KSBY, and Costco gave away 100 skating tickets to kids who raised their reading levels in school.
Hoping to just break even on the enterprise, Carcarey expects tens of thousands of skaters to eventually take advantage of the rare opportunity. No matter how the rink performs financially, the Venture Group already has agreements in place with the city and the Town Center to bring it back again next year, starting what could be a new holiday tradition in Santa Maria.
“The big tell-all will be when school gets out for winter break and we’ll see how the numbers look,” the city’s Smitherman said. “If the community wants it back next year and can support it this year, we’ll be able to determine that as we move along through the duration of the rink.”
Staff Writer Jeremy Thomas goes around and around about ice. Contact him at jthomas@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Dec 23-30, 2010.
