A graphic showing features planned in five phases of a new skate park at Faulkner Park in Tyler, Texas. (Courtesy)

A new skate park being planned in Tyler will be phased in over several years to spread out the cost.

Phase 1 will be 3,500 square feet, built in a triangular shape. It will serve as one corner of a larger skate park to be built out in future phases.

The new skate park will be on the western side of Faulkner Park and is designed to replace the 14,000-square-foot, deteriorating skate park at Noble E. Young Park.

The Tyler City Council approved earlier this month paying $188,220 to SPA Skateparks of Austin to build Phase 1. The project budget for the current fiscal year was about $200,000.

Russ Jackson, the director of parks and recreation for the city, told the City Council that the skate park at Noble E. Young will be torn down, but not until Phase 2 of the Faulkner Park skate park is complete.

“The overall plan is to relocate the skate park from a Community Park into a Regional Park,” Jackson wrote in prepared comments. “Faulkner Park has the best available space and convenience for public access and safety.”

Jeff Reeves, the representative for the East Texas Skatepark Association, said in an interview he is pleased with the decision to hire a professional company but disappointed in the size of the project.

“Hopefully next year we’ll be able to fill in Phase 2, which will increase the size probably to about 12,000 square feet,” Reeves said. “They’re trying to phase it in to five different phases.”

He said he likes Faulkner Park as a new location because of its proximity to a police substation, parking lots and ample lighting. He said the old park attracts as many as 40 people per day, but it’s ragged and deteriorating.

Reeves said he started the East Texas Skatepark Association years ago to advocate for upgrades to Noble E. Young Park. The group raised about $6,000 in four years, not nearly enough to build even Phase 1 of the new skate park, he said.

“For the longest time (the city was) just like, ‘We don’t have any money. We don’t have any money,’ and we did that for kind of six to eight years straight, and we kind of got to the point where we gave up on asking the city for money,” Reeves said.

The city has made more progress, he said. The money is coming from a combination of donations to the city and the Parks and Recreation Department’s capital budget.

“Eventually that park will be a 15,000- to 20,000-square-foot park, which will be great,” he said. “That’s five years down the road.”

TWITTER and INSTAGRAM: @_erinmansfield