BMX track will be built in Mark Twain

MARK TWAIN - About 10 boys and a couple of dads with tractors will take out an acre's worth of sagebrush at Mark Twain Park and shape a BMX track for dirt bikes.

Earth could move in the next couple weeks, said Mike Piazza, the dad spearheading the effort to give kids a place to do bicycle acrobatics somewhere other than off curbs and porches.

"I decided they needed something," said Piazza, the "parts guy" at Carson City Toyota-Mazda, not to be confused with the New York Mets catcher.

Piazza, 39, lives in Mark Twain and still enjoys riding bikes himself. He said demolition last year of the impromptu BMX track across from Mills Park led to him want to build a track in Mark Twain, the community at the eastern end of Dayton Valley.

"Once that was taken away they had nowhere else to go," Piazza said. "Kids are jumping everything and getting in trouble. You need to support the kids."

Piazza and a group of neighborhood kids, including his 10-year-old son Vinnie, will get together soon and decide on the type of jumps. He said half the track will be rideable for any bikers and the other half will have extreme jumps.

"I am trying to instill on the boys when you go there leave everything else alone," Piazza said. "Leave the lawns alone."

Piazza figures two or three days of sagebrush removal and moving dirt with two or three tractors will create a good layout for BMX bikers.

The one-acre BMX track will be at the west end of Mark Twain Park, the farthest from the homes on Ring and Roughing-It roads.

The track will be posted for bicycle use only. Motorcycles will be prohibited.

"With bicycles there shouldn't be a dust problem," said Dan O'Brien, Lyon County's public works director.

The Central Lyon County Parks and Recreation Board recommended adding a BMX track to Mark Twain Park and the Lyon County Commission approved the new feature for the mostly undeveloped 26-acre park.

The bike track will join a dirt baseball field built last year by Landmark Homes and Paragon Associates. The field still awaits a donor for grass but it does have dugouts and a backstop, courtesy of a $6,000 donation from Smith's Food and Drug in Dayton.

"The board is very supportive of anything and anybody that wants to do something in the park," said Jannette Hoffert, Central Lyon's parks and recreation supervisor. "We want millions of different types of activities and programs."

For Central Lyon Parks and Recreation, though, much in the way of park facilities and programs come by way of volunteers and donations. Before the rustic ball field claimed a portion of Mark Twain Park, it was 26 acres of sagebrush with a name.

Hoffert envisions adding three more baseball fields of different sizes for Mark Twain Park. Also, she would like to see a group picnic area, playground equipment, horseshoe pitching courts and bocce ball courts.

For the time being, the ball field and the BMX track will not have league play or races. They will be practise facilities.

The BMX track will likely be a changing artwork.

"The one thing I like about the BMX track," Hoffert said, " is it's just piles of dirt. If it gets boring, they can just change it."

Piazza, too, noted that all it takes is a tractor or two to create a new track.

"If we get the track and jumps built good enough, hopefully we'll get people from the surrounding area to ride it and try it out," Piazza said.