The county-owned park opened in 2014 with support from a veritable alphabet soup of state and county agencies. But one former mine in adjacent Coal Township sees nearly 20,000 visitors per year, tourists flocking in from New York, New Jersey, and elsewhere in Pennsylvania to ride dirt bikes, ATVs, 4x4 trucks, and other vehicles, legally, on the 8,000-acre AOAA. For decades, they served as unofficial dumps, places for teens to light bonfires after football games and, of course, to ride dirt bikes and ATVs illegally.
Of all the vacancies, the most difficult to fill are former strip mines, thousands of acres on the outskirts of town often hard to reclaim and develop due to environmental issues. Today, Shamokin has a fair number of downtown vacancies, but after six years and major reductions in budget shortfalls, it is in the process of exiting Pennsylvania’s Act 47, a program administered by the state Department of Community and Economic Development to keep cities “experiencing severe financial distress” afloat. The coal industry waned and the population plummeted. The city had more than 21,000 residents a century ago, when nearly every business benefited from the anthracite mined from the mountains rising around it. Like most things in Shamokin, the story begins with coal. “I was a cop for 20 years, and I had to chase these things all over the place, trying to keep them off the streets.” “My first reaction? Absolutely not,” said Mayor John Brown. In Shamokin, the route connects the area’s only major tourist attraction, the Anthracite Outdoor Adventure Area in adjacent Coal Township, to a city that desperately needs tourists. Communities in West Virginia and New Hampshire have passed similar ordinances.
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While Philadelphia, 125 miles to the southeast, contemplates how to combat illegal dirt-bike riding on city streets, Shamokin recently passed an ordinance allowing off-road vehicles to drive from a nearby off-road park’s trail onto specific streets in the downtown business district. “It’s the whole reason I’m opening up a business here,” said Ed Manning, a Berks County native who moved to Shamokin to start a cigar lounge. In this former coal town of 6,984 in Northumberland County, foot traffic is a thing of the past, however, and city officials are banking on dirt-bike riders’ muddy boot traffic to give its businesses the crowds they haven’t seen in decades. Most cities see dirt bikes and ATVs as a scourge of the streets, annoying on the best days, and deadly on the worst.
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