Fort Kent’s free, volunteer-maintained outdoor skating rink was vandalized over the weekend.
It seems someone destroyed a shovel and a few scrapers on-site as well as breaking one of the nets. The next set of skaters to use the rink also found garbage strewn all over the area.
“I don’t know if it’s bigger kids or young adults playing a little harder or what, it’s hard to say when no one’s watching them,” says Rossaire Brousseau, who supplied the nets and is a major volunteer in keeping the rink serviceable. “It’s a public rink. It’s open to everybody.”
However, the incident hasn’t phased him too much. “What I’ll do is I’ll just get some old pipe or whatever from a scrap bin and I’ll just weld up a hockey net that they can’t break.”
There’s still some good news for the rink compared to last year though. “There’s a bunch of volunteers it’s not just myself. There’s a whole bunch of people who help keep that rink this year. Last year nobody volunteered, it stayed empty. So this year a whole bunch of community members stepped up to help out. I might be the main guy, but there’s a lot of them who are stepping up and helping me with the cleaning and the flooding.”
Brousseau also wishes to remind people that the rink is free to use by anyone so long as they are respectful of the property.