In late June, the city’s Office of Procurement Services quietly announced that — huzzah and hallelujah — two groups had rolled up with proposals to take off City Hall’s hands a property Dallas has been trying to offload since George W. Bush’s first term. That would be Southern Skates, the roller rink on East Ledbetter Drive funded with federal dollars and for decades kept alive with the city’s spare change.
I’d never heard of either of the parties the city said was vying for Southern Skates, which had been willed into existence decades ago on once-vacant, drug-infested land by a collegiate track star-turned-Air Force-vet-turned-Black Panther named Fahim Minkah. But, maybe, there was some good news at last for the money-losing skating rink the city never wanted and has now all but erased from its budget.
An email with the subject heading “Operational Management of The Southern Skates Roller Rink” arrived at the end of last week: “The City has determined to cancel this solicitation to reassess the current needs and readvertise the solicitation at a future date.” Sigh. Shrug. Shoot. But not a surprise.
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The two wanna-be operators were considered “unresponsive,” said John Jenkins, director of Dallas’ Park and Recreation Department. “Which means they didn’t meet some of the minimum requirements we were asking for, or they didn’t provide accurate responses.”
Keshia Randall, the department’s assistant director, later explained the procurement office had to cancel the process so they could start it all over again. Again. Best I can figure, this will be the fifth time the city’s tried to skate on Southern Skates.
The first was in 2005, when a man offered to buy it from the city for pennies on the dollar to remake it as a discount bazaar — no, thanks. The community, surveyed by the city, wanted a skating rink. But in 2008 City Hall declared it surplus property, only to discover that anything built with $1 million in U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development loans isn’t just something you could sell for the shell. So the city kept funding it, and in 2017 tried to find a third-party operator. It came up empty for the first but not the last time.
Southern Skates celebrates its 27th anniversary this month with the city yet again trying to find someone to take it off the Park and Recreation Department’s hands.
File photo/Dallas Morning News
It’d be funny if it weren’t so sad if it weren’t so infuriating. Especially since whenever it comes up at City Council, every rookie rep acts like they’re the first ones to propose zero’ing it out in the budget. North Dallas’ Bill Roth last year sent the city manager a memo insisting that “operating a roller rink is not a core government function and should be managed privately.”
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Which everyone knows. And has known. For years. Since November 2003, to be precise, when Minkah defaulted on the loan and left the city holding the feds’ bag, resulting in foreclosure the following March and 22 years of teeth-gnashing and handwringing ever since.
Southern Skates, which opened 27 years ago this month, has been a punchline and punching bag for so long we forget why it even exists in the first place: because “Minkah was interested in providing kids with constructive alternatives to gangs and drugs,” Ann Zimmerman wrote in the Dallas Observer in 1997. The Black Panther born Fred Bell, a roller-skater long before shiny maple floors and disco balls overhead were ironic throwbacks, had spent the late 1980s and early ’90s patrolling South Oak Cliff apartments surrendered to crack dealers.
A skating rink, he told the Observer, would “take up the slack left by the black business community that had failed to develop the community.” A community that now drives and walks past the 23,000-square foot Southern Skates, which sits across from a church and next to a pawn shop, and sees it gated, locked and empty four days a week.
It took years for Minkah to raise the $1.5 million needed to build the rink; longer, still, for City Hall to approve it. Delays ultimately led to the city funding the project with HUD money: $550,000 in Community Development Block Grant loans, another $560,000 in Section 108 loans. Chase Bank loaned Minkah another $400,000.
Fahim Minkah’s in front of Southern Skates in 2004, after a foreclosure forced the city to temporarily shutter the roller rink. The city has spent decades trying to either offload Southern Skates or find a third-party operator to run the South Oak Cliff venue.
File photo/Dallas Morning News
Randall told a council committee earlier this year that Southern Skates used to cost the city $384,000 annually — not including a fortune in fixes made in recent years, which bumped that figure to $492,000 in 2024 and $459,000 in 2025. Now, that number is a big fat zero in the budget just approved by the City Council, which means Southern Skates has no full-time staffers, only “borrowed” personnel, as Randall explained, from around the park department.
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Southern Skates — which is only open Thursdays, Saturdays and Sundays — does bring in revenue, largely from private rentals; Randall said it made around $120,000 in 2023 and $130,000 the following year. But that plummeted to $85,000 in 2025, when the rink was closed for a couple of months — during summer break, no less — to deal with a shifting foundation.
And as we reported earlier this year, Southern Skates went for months without heat after its gas service was shut off. It took months for anyone to notice.
The just-adopted budget counted on the city finding someone to take the skating rink off its hands by Oct. 1 — “a transition operation … to a third-party operator,” the budget reads through crossed fingers, “to focus on core Park and Recreation service delivery.” Randall told me Monday that if the park department winds up operating Southern Skates throughout the current fiscal year, it could cost around $140,000, which sounds like a fortune when you’re talking about a city so broke it keeps toying with the idea of planting billboards in parks.
Southern Skates’ lobby, which was all I could see Monday through the window as the roller rink is closed all but three days a week.
Robert Wilonsky/Staff writer
Jenkins said Monday the city is again open to selling Southern Skates — if city attorneys would allow it — to “someone who has the experience and a track record.” At this late date, he said, “everything is on the table.” Because operating a skating rink isn’t “a core service” of the park department.
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“You know they say let the private sector do what it does best?” Jenkins said. “This is an example of that. I prefer to be focusing on what we do best — managing parks and recreation centers.”
Parks like the 17-acre greenspace about a mile away, just down Bonnie View Road. College Park, it used to be called. Until March, anyway, when city officials planted a sign renaming it Fahim J. Minkah Park.