Aaron Spohn couldn’t get City Hall interested in his plan to set up a skateboard park with wood ramps in Venice. So he built one in his backyard instead.

That was about two decades ago. And his friends flocked to his Westchester home and rode his half-pipe for hours. As a carpenter, he knew how to build excellent skating surfaces.

“I just wanted to take the ramps and jumps to the next level,” Spohn said.

He hadn’t planned on launching a business that has emerged as one of the country’s leading builders of municipal skate parks.

The company, Spohn Ranch Skate Parks, has designed and built more than 400 skate parks since its founding in 1993, tapping into a surprisingly constant demand from teenage skateboard fans and their parents for cities to create safe places to skate.

But now, Spohn Ranch faces a challenge if it’s to thrive in a niche industry with total U.S. market value estimated at less than $100 million. The biggest problem: Cash-strapped cities are scaling back plans for bigger and better skate parks. Also, the company faces new competition from bigger playground equipment manufacturers.

Kirsten Bradford, Spohn Ranch chief executive, said the City of Industry company is proposing lower-cost skate parks and is developing a new market: military bases where there are many young families. The company recently completed a skate park at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base on the island of Cuba.

X Games launch

Spohn, 49, said he was originally motivated by the first generation of skate parks built in the late ’70s and early ’80s. These early parks were mostly private ventures. But by the mid-1980s, the parks closed up because they weren’t financially viable due in part to soaring liability premiums.

That’s when Spohn built his own. Originally meant for some of his closest friends, his private skate park started drawing skateboarders from all over Southern California. “It became a real social center,” he said.

Among those who showed up to skate was Bradford, now 34, who lived nearby.

Spohn, Bradford and each of their brothers decided to form the Spohn Ranch business in 1993 to build skate parks. But the team wasn’t overly ambitious at first. Spohn already had a day job working as a carpenter on custom residential projects – he was the job foreman on the remodel of the famed Pickfair Mansion, then owned by actress Pia Zadora – so he didn’t have a lot of time for the Spohn Ranch venture.

That changed in early 1995 with a phone call from sports television network ESPN. The network was putting on the first-ever X Games and needed ramps for the skateboarding competition.

“So I started hiring everybody I knew,” Spohn said.

Spohn Ranch completed the ramps, and the skateboarding events at the X Games proved wildly popular. That led to more orders.

Spohn and Bradford decided to focus their efforts on city contracts to build permanent public parks and maintain them.

“What we found is that cities were desperate for ways to keep teenagers off the streets,” Bradford said. “They were also looking at the popularity of skateboarding after the X Games.”

But there was one stumbling block: Cities did not want to be liable for injuries to skateboarders in their skate parks. So Bradford and other skateboard industry advocates got the Legislature to pass a bill, AB 1296, exempting cities from liability. Similar laws were passed in other states.

After that, Spohn Ranch built skate parks in Los Angeles, Long Beach, Fresno and dozens of other cities in California and throughout the nation.

Los Angeles now has 11 skate parks, five of them built by Spohn Ranch.

Challenging task

Small-scale skate parks made of wood or other composite materials can cost as little as $30,000 or $40,000; larger parks made primarily of concrete can cost up to $2 million. The typical park costs between $200,000 and $500,000, and takes about six months to build. Spohn Ranch designs and builds all types.

But with cities now facing their worst budget crunches in nearly 20 years, skate park projects are being set aside.

“We have a master plan that calls for three more skate parks in our city,” said Anna Mendiola, parks development officer for the city of Long Beach. Spohn Ranch just broke ground on a skate park renovation project in that city, but Mendiola said it would likely be the last such project for a while.

Spohn Ranch also faces another challenge. Some playground facility manufacturers are trying to branch into skate parks, adding to the competition for municipal contracts, said Kaisja Clark, editorial assistant for Harris Publishing, which publishes Playground Magazine.

As a result, Bradford said, the name of the game is now bidding as low as possible on contracts, which has forced Spohn Ranch to propose more modest skate parks for cities. Two years ago, Spohn Ranch purchased True Ride, a rival Minnesota skate park designer that primarily used cheaper wood ramps.

“The wood is very durable, yet it’s cheaper than concrete. So it has allowed us to lower our price points,” Bradford said.

Spohn Ranch is also pursuing its strategy of penetrating the military market. The company was a subcontractor to Irvine-based Water Ventures Inc. on a $400,000 concrete skate park that was just completed in August at Fort Irwin, northeast of Barstow.

“On military bases, you find lots of playground facilities for small children of the families that stay there, but teenagers often get left out of the mix,” said Water Ventures President Maarten Voogd.

Spohn Ranch will have to continue diversifying so that when city budgets are periodically squeezed it has other revenue.

But Spohn is optimistic that orders from cities will return one day.

“We’ve proven that this is no passing fad,” Spohn said. “The demand is here and it’s here to stay.”

SPOHN RANCH SKATE PARKS

HEADQUARTERS: City of Industry

FOUNDED: 1993

CORE BUSINESS: Designing and building skateboard parks

EMPLOYEES: 20

GOALS: To diversify from municipal market, especially into military market; to obtain more, but smaller, contracts

THE NUMBERS: $4.8 million revenue in 2008. Recent revenue growth propelled company to No. 2,950 on Inc. Magazine’s annual ranking of 5,000 fastest-growing companies.