by Robert Lynch; September 2, 2025
In 2024, visionary and skateboarding enthusiast Dan Woodring conceived and constructed Enfield SkateGarden. He elicited the Town Board’s consent, helped secure a $5,000 Tompkins County parks grant, and then marshaled an army of like-minded volunteers to finish the project’s ever-changing first-phase. A nonprofit umbrella group held weekly concerts there last fall.
Now, one year later, Woodring’s out of the picture, there’s no more parks money, SkateGarden lies dormant, and the Enfield Town Board finds itself out of ideas regarding how to placate angry neighbors while at the same time giving this municipally-owned, woodchip-covered ghost of a park a respectable second life.
“Take a bulldozer and flatten it. That’s my idea. It’s an eyesore,” Enfield resident Rosie Carpenter, a candidate this year for Town Board, interjected August 13, as the board she seeks to join held an impromptu, off-the-agenda discussion to address SkateGarden’s future.
Carpenter struck an immediate alliance with the man seated beside her in the gallery’s front row, John Rancich, owner of Stoneybrook apartments, the complex the abuts the Town-owned SkateGarden site to its north and rear.
“Well, it is an eyesore,” Rancich affirmed. “And it’s an eyesore to my 14 tenants. It’s a health hazard… Children can get hurt there. It’s a hazard, and the Town Board doesn’t have enough land to do what they want.”
But doing what they want remains very much a question unanswered. And during the Town Board’s 20-minute SkateGarden discussion that August night, Enfield Supervisor Stephanie Redmond emerged as the one person in Town Government most passionate about promoting a futuristic initiative. Aside from asking the occasional question, the Town Board’s other four members stayed silent.
Regarding the lonely half-pipe that Woodring had built, “We have that there; it’s the start of something,” Redmond said. “But I want us to understand, it’s only a start. Now let’s collaborate and think of how can we create something beautiful there… I really want to see something lovely there that people will use.”
But beauty always remains in the eyes of the beholder. And unless you’re a skateboarding fanatic, like Dan Woodring is, Enfield SkateGarden leaves very much to be desired. There’s the half-pipe, of course, and then there’s… well: there’s a single picnic table; and nearby there’s a tiered attempt at an amphitheater, one that never gets used anymore. There’s a pollinator garden that was left unattended for much of the summer. And of course, there are the wood shavings underfoot, a whole lot of wood shavings underfoot, a poor substitute for natural turf. With no shelter and zero shade, SkateGarden is no place for a picnic.
“You know, it’s just poor planning,” Rancich told Redmond and the Board. “If Dan was your planner, I understand entirely how it all went amok. But he’s not here to take the blame or to pay for the mistakes, you are,” Stoneybrook’s landlord admonished the Town Board.
And that brings one to the second—and maybe the third—parts of this story: How and when did SkateGarden architect Dan Woodring fall out of favor with the Enfield Town Supervisor? And how and when did the Town Board commit itself to developing—and by inference, funding—a ramp-enhanced public park in downtown Enfield Center, assuming it ever had?
Dan Woodring has dreamed of reconstructing a miniaturized replica of Philadelphia’s famed “Love Park,” a concrete-covered urban space oasis that skateboarders had more or less appropriated and assigned Mecca-like reverence. Love Park may now be gone, but its vision remains firmly ingrained in Dan Woodring’s mind, heart and soul.
“This is a classic case of it started small and it just kept building and building and building,” this Enfield Councilperson, Robert Lynch, remarked as his only notable contribution to the evening’s SkateGarden discussion, a conversation dominated by back-and-forth between Supervisor Redmond and Rancich.
Dan Woodring first approached the Enfield Town Board in March 2024. This website’s reporting at the time stated that initial plans had called for “a wooden ramp, 24 feet long, 16 feet wide, and three feet high.” Woodring estimated construction would require “24 sheets of plywood and some volunteer labor.”
Woodring drew the Town Board’s attention to a similar ramp employed at GrassRoots festivals and parked off-season behind Trumansburg’s Maguire dealership. Given its rudimentary construction, the ramp could easily be moved or even dismantled. Woodring invited the Enfield Community Council (ECC) to quarter the ramp behind its own community center, but insurance issues precluded its location there. A rider on the Town’s liability policy costs a fraction of the premium ECC would have had to pay.
To make the ramp accessible to ECC youths, the Town Board rejected siting it on a vastly larger alternate site near the present Enfield Highway Garage and instead opted to place it on a small grassy patch of Town property between the park-and-ride lot and Rancich’s apartments, across from the Town Hall.
But month after month, as Woodring revisited the Town Board with updates, his vision evolved, and with it, the project’s scope grew. With the help of a $5,000 Tompkins County-funded Parks and Trails grant, initial plans for a portable wooden platform gave way to an in-ground ramp made of poured concrete. At one point, Woodring had proposed a heart-shape oval basin in tribute to Love Park. Economies and issues of skater safety yielded to the simpler half-pipe configuration. Volunteers poured concrete last fall. Yet boards, boulders, and even Woodring’s cement mixer littered SkateGarden’s site through winter.
This spring, Supervisor Redmond, with the help of Councilpersons Cassandra Hinkle, Melissa Millspaugh, and the Enfield Highway Department, engineered a cleanup. Debris was hauled away and highway crews smoothed out some of the dangerous drop-offs that Woodring’s crews had left near the half-pipe.
But at about that same time, Stephanie Redmond and Dan Woodring had an all-too-apparent, yet never-stated-in-public, falling out.
This spring Redmond made clear to other Board members that Dan Woodring was off the project. She more or less just declared it to be so. Tompkins County’s parks grant program had ended, so there was no more money. Woodring’s proposed “phase two” design for SkateGarden was informally scuttled, although no official Town Board votes were ever taken.
And the Supervisor privately made known there’d been disagreements. “The original project got away from those involved and we are now looking on making the location safer,” official minutes from the Board’s June 11 meeting record the Supervisor as having stated.
Dan Woodring shared his frustrations as well.
“I feel used for the over 500 hours of manual labor, dozens of organization, hundreds of out of pocket expense, care and enthusiasm I put into your community park,” Woodring wrote this Councilperson, Lynch, in early July. “Nobody else would give a quarter of their work year towards community. I wouldn’t have done all that if you hadn’t of agreed to a long term goal, and I feel misled and exhausted by your mistreatment,” SkateGarden’s visionary said to the Town.
Woodring’s email quoted a text message he’d received from Deputy Supervisor Greg Hutnik, Enfield’s point-person on parks. Hutnik’s purported message stated in part:
“The town supervisor is the only one who sets the agenda, it is entirely their (sic) discretion. The town board made it clear at the last meeting that they do not want any further additions to the skate park at this time.”
Hutnik’s message continued, “I can assure you that people, including Stephanie and I, are very appreciative of your work and motivation to do the project. You made something incredible in Enfield, and even though it’s not the full vision you had in mind, I hope you can be proud too”
“We are not working with that contractor any longer,” Redmond bluntly replied to Rancich’s criticism of SkateGarden’s status during this August’s impromptu discussion. Quite, plainly, she referred to Woodring and the nonprofit organization he’d established. “We’re not going to add onto the skate ramp in the sense that he had wanted to. That’s not happening,” Redmond insisted.
“Obviously Dan has floated a lot of ideas for there,” Redmond acknowledged that night. “They no longer seem feasible financially, and also there were things that just didn’t happen there the way we wanted it sort of tidied up after each phase,” the Supervisor maintained. “And so we are feeling like that couldn’t go forward with the plan that he had sort of laid out in front of us.”
Repeatedly, Supervisor Stephanie Redmond spoke single-handedly on behalf of the entire Enfield Town Board, even though state law controls that a Supervisor’s powers stand limited, and that final authority always rests with the five-person Board. The Enfield Town Board’s last recorded vote on SkateGarden was in August of last year, when members approved ground rules for Woodring’s nonprofit organization to stage weekly concerts there.
By law, town supervisors in New York set the agendas, preside over meetings, pay bills, and address emergencies. Their powers do not equate to those of a city mayor or a county executive. With Enfield SkateGarden, Stephanie Redmond has chosen to exert her executive authority about as far as it reaches, if not a trifle beyond.
In reply to this writer’s, Councilperson Lynch’s, inquiry at this latest August meeting, Supervisor Redmond confirmed that the Town of Enfield has no remaining contractual ties to Woodring or his organization, obligations that would bind the Town to Enfield SkateGarden Inc. in any of its further actions.
But if fancy performance stages and heart-shape ovals do not lie in SkateGarden’s future, what does? Supervisor Redmond tossed that question into the August night’s sky last month, begging for direction. She didn’t always like what she heard.
“You should seriously consider what Rosie says, treating this with a bulldozer,” John Rancich reasoned, “because everyone was happy with a grass field there. I was actually mowing some of it for you,” he said. Rancich hinted he’d even buy the plot, but wouldn’t keep it as a skate park.
No, Supervisor Redmond tersely countered, leveling the site isn’t happening. Nobody ever used the grassy area, the Supervisor maintained.
“We are not going along with (Woodring’s) next phases because we realized that Phase One was as much as we could handle,” Redmond informed those present. Rather, there’ll need to be re-landscaping, the supervisor explained, Redmond attempting to speak for all of us on decisions not yet made.
“And so we are deciding to do something different with that area,” Redmond said, “and we want to know what does that look like? What’s the vision? And don’t say grass here because that’s not being used, and we’re asking to create a park there.”
To some of us in the room, including some Town Board members, Redmond’s self-stated initiative caught us by surprise.
But if John Rancich is to be believed, Enfield SkateGarden will indeed, soon look different. That night he promised to erect a big fence to separate the skate park’s ramp from his own property.
Rancich has also followed through on another promise he’d made that night. Within days the landlord invited each of Stoneybrook’s 14 tenants to attend the Town Board’s September 10 meeting “to make suggestions to the board about what you feel should be done with the ‘SkateGarden.”’
“I’ve got 14 families living there bitchin’ to me,” Rancich said. “What am I supposed to do?”
So expect the skate park’s discussions to spill into a second month, perhaps longer, and maybe intensify.
Though quite unrelated, representatives from Ithaca’s Community Arts Partnership (CAP) later during the August meeting shared a very preliminary sketch of the community sculpture CAP will donate to Enfield and place on Town property. The initial rendering would take the form of a 16-foot tall stainless steel clump of sunflowers surrounded by corn stalks and resting on a giant turtle.
Up until now, plans have called for placing the sculpture on property near the highway garage—where some would like another town park to be put someday. “It is out in the middle of nowhere,” Tony, the assigned sculptor, acknowledged. Upon the suggestion that SkateGarden would be a more fitting, visible location, others, including Redmond, welcomed the sculpture’s relocation.
But bulldozer or no bulldozer, sculpture or not, much remains for the reinvention of one man’s ever-evolving dream, a project that innocently began with a simple wooden ramp, and then spiraled out of control meeting after meeting only to reach an unceremonious dead-end; hitting that dead end while engendering hurt feelings.
“I’m not happy with this Town Board and their treatment of me as their neighbor,” John Rancich put it squarely to Enfield’s leaders sitting at their head table August 13. “You guys have had a pretty decent idea. You actually had a really good idea, except you chose the wrong spot. OK? And now you did it without talking to me.”
Supervisor Redmond, for her part, posited random thoughts: Maybe the Enfield Community Council would welcome a “natural play structure” on the site, one that won’t fit on its own property, she opined. Redmond saw that solitary picnic table as a start. “That’s there; awesome,” Redmond exclaimed.
“So now, what does the Town want to happen?” the Supervisor tossed out into the room for anyone to grab. No one did. “What would be nice? Would a playground be nice there? I have no idea.”
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