Despite the many municipal charms that draw visitors to San Jose from all over California — highest income per household! — the city has few attractions it can point to as the state’s biggest or best.

But unless a coalition of outraged parents and corporate fat cats can quickly cobble together a budget shortfall of $61,000, the city soon may have to pull the plug on a crowned jewel: the biggest skate park in all of California.

Lake Cunningham Regional Skate Park, on San Jose’s southeast side, is set in a 68,000-square-foot moonscape that features the world’s largest “cradle,” the tallest vertical wall and the largest full-pipe on the planet. “It’s a spectacular park with something for everybody,” said Peter Whitley, programs director for skateboarding’s Tony Hawk Foundation. Whitley puts San Jose’s knee-scraping superbowls among the nation’s best “in terms of size and majesty.”

The park cost $6.4 million — the city paid $4.8 million, with $1.6 million coming from the state — to build, but three years after it opened, it remains unknown to most residents, registering only 40,000 admissions a year. “It’s a shame,” said Carol Kruger, who didn’t know the skate park existed until a recent family outing to Raging Waters, also on Lake Cunningham. “I don’t think people in San Jose know what they have hidden there.”

Kruger is a supporter of the park so impassioned that she, her husband and 8-year-old son Jimmy all spoke in its defense before the City Council Tuesday. “Please don’t punish my kids,” she said, her voice trembling. Jimmy wore his red skate helmet when he spoke to the assembled council. “If I could,” he said of the park, “I would live there.”

Several options

A group called Save Our Skatepark, made up mostly of concerned parents, has been meeting regularly for the past six weeks, formulating plans it put before the city’s Parks and Recreation department Wednesday night to reduce staff and raise money for the skate park, possibly by attracting sponsors.

San Jose parks manager Cindy Rebhan pulled out a sponsorship plan she devised in 2008, but that was never implemented by the park’s ex-supervisor. Rebhan said big companies wanted to see far more people using the park.

“All I see is the awesomeness out there,” sighed Kim Smallwood, a skate mom whose son is a regular. Everyone agreed that keeping night sessions open — with supervision — is a must.

“The reason skate parks become a draw for drugs is they are completely unsupervised,” said Henry Duran, who drives to Lake Cunningham from San Ramon with his son three times a week. “Where else would you ever send your kids with other unsupervised kids and adults?”

There are three potential courses open to the cash-strapped city, which has already threatened to close and sell Rancho del Pueblo municipal golf course golf course, and possibly shutter library branches and community centers:

Padlock the park: This is the nuclear option, and probably the easiest choice for city leaders to embrace after clamoring to close other money-losing facilities. But enough potential corporate sponsors and private donors have been lined up to make the district’s councilwoman, Rose Herrera, optimistic that closure isn’t in the cards. “I don’t think that’s one of the options being considered,” she said, following a meeting with potential sponsors and Mayor Chuck Reed Wednesday. “By closing it, it doesn’t mean that kids won’t be skating,” noted Whitley. “It means they’ll simply return to the streets, where they’ll be at risk of being hit by cars, or be a nuisance to business owners. The risk just gets transferred elsewhere, it doesn’t go away.”

Make it an unsupervised free-for-all: “All the unstaffed skate parks in San Jose are filthy, there’s drug sales going on, there’s graffiti everywhere,” said Kruger. “Our park is pristine. You don’t hear F-bombs every other word. The great thing about Lake Cunningham is it’s staffed. Everybody has to wear helmets and pads. Nobody’s smoking dope around the full pipe because there’s cameras. If the staffing went away, I probably would not be going to that park anymore.” “I believe if we don’t have park rangers out there, we could end up having a lot of problems,” Herrera said. “I’d be worried that it wouldn’t continue to be the safe place for families that it is right now.”