A $12 million skate park is coming to Joyner Park

Wake Forest is building a $12 million recreation complex on 8.3 acres beside Joyner Park, and the centerpiece is a skate park and a pump track. The design is not finished, and the town is holding a public meeting on September 30 to hear what people want in it.

That meeting is the point of this article. Once the plans are stamped, they are stamped, and this is the last stretch where a resident’s opinion can still change what gets poured.

What is actually being built

The site is 8.3 acres next to Devon Square and E. Carroll Joyner Park, off 701 Harris Road. The town’s project page lists the full program: a skate park, a pump track, basketball courts, an outdoor fitness court, a pavilion, restrooms, parking, lighting, and a road extension connecting through to the Joyner Park Community Center.

If you have not run into one before, a pump track is a closed loop of rollers and banked turns built so riders generate speed by shifting their weight instead of pedaling. Bikes, scooters, skateboards. It is the piece of this project that will get used hardest, because it works for a six-year-old on a balance bike and a teenager on a BMX at the same time.

The skate park is being designed and built by New Line Skateparks, the firm the town hired to manage the project. That matters more than it sounds. Skate parks built by general contractors without skate-specific design tend to be the ones nobody skates, and hiring a specialist firm is the difference between concrete that works and concrete that sits empty.

The basketball courts and fitness court broaden who the site serves. A skate park alone draws one crowd at one time of day. Courts plus a pavilion plus restrooms make it a place a family stays for two hours.

Where the $12 million comes from

The funding is worth walking through, because almost none of it is coming out of town property taxes.

Wake County put in $3,891,000 from the hospitality tax. The county commissioners approved that on February 16, 2026, as part of a $4.6 million package to Wake Forest that also sent $750,000 to Flaherty Park Phase 2.

The hospitality tax is a 6 percent charge on hotel and motel stays plus 1 percent on restaurant and bar food and drink, authorized by state legislation from 1991, and it can only be spent on arts, culture, sports and convention facilities. In plain terms: visitors who stay in Wake County hotels and eat in Wake County restaurants are paying for a large share of this skate park.

Another $500,000 came from a PARTF grant, the state’s Parks and Recreation Trust Fund, awarded in late 2024. Between the two, roughly $4.4 million of the $12 million is outside money.

That is a good ratio, and it is also why the project has stayed alive. Grant-funded parks projects survive budget seasons that locally funded ones do not.

The timeline has already slipped, and the town says so

Here is the part worth knowing before you go to the meeting expecting to skate next summer.

When the county approved the money in February, the announcement said construction would begin later in 2026. The town’s own project page now lists an anticipated start of February 2027, and notes the work was originally scheduled for fall 2026. Site plans were approved on July 30, 2026, and the project was still described as in design as of July 9.

So that is a slip of roughly a year from the original schedule to the current one, and the town has published it rather than quietly updating a date. Credit where it is due. The project page also carries the standard disclaimer that schedules move for funding, weather and equipment delivery.

Our read: February 2027 is a start date, not an opening date. A project this size with restrooms, parking and a road extension in it is a twelve to eighteen month build once ground breaks. Plan on 2028 for the first legal drop-in, and treat anything earlier as a bonus.

Why Joyner Park is the right place and the hard place

Joyner Park is the most-searched place name in Wake Forest. More people look it up in a given month than look up almost anything else in town, which is a decent proxy for how many people already go there.

Putting the skate park next to it means shared parking, shared restrooms, an audience that is already driving out Harris Road, and a road extension the community center needed anyway. It also means the skate park inherits Joyner Park’s traffic problem on a Saturday in October, when the big park events fill the lots by ten in the morning.

The other tension is noise and hours. Skate parks are loud, lighting them extends the hours, and 8.3 acres is not a lot of buffer. The lighting plan is exactly the sort of thing the September 30 meeting exists to argue about, and the people who show up will shape it more than the people who complain in 2028.

How to weigh in

The meeting is Tuesday, September 30 at 6 p.m. in the Wake Forest Town Hall ground floor meeting room at 301 S. Brooks Street. Use the Taylor Street entrance.

PRCR staff will present the plans alongside representatives from New Line Skateparks, and there is an open discussion after the presentation where you can ask questions and make suggestions. That is a real comment period, not a formality, because the design is not final.

If you cannot make it, the project has a page on the town’s Engage Wake Forest platform, and PRCR Director Ruben Wall is the staff contact for the project.

Three things worth raising if you go: how the skate park is lit and until what hour, whether the pump track is built for beginners or for experienced riders, and how parking is going to work on days when Joyner Park already has an event. Those are the decisions that determine whether this thing gets used or resented.

Wake Forest has been asking for a skate park for years. It is funded, it has a designer, and it has a site. What it does not have yet is a final plan, and for the next two weeks that is still up for discussion.