The process is painfully slow here in District 6, as David has noticed. I had hoped for a dog park we could walk to. There are plenty of sites within walking distance of my house. I sense quite a bit of NIMBYism related to this topic.
The site at Lyndale-Farmstead Park seemed to have been shut down by folks who made wild claims that dogs would bite elderly people in the leg and attack and devour toddlers in the play areas. It seems to me that folks just did not want the change. This particular meeting was quite hilarious in some ways due to the absurdity of the arguments made against the establishment of a dog park there. You'd think that ROMP stands for "Ravenous Ogres & Mad People" or something. It seems that the hastily organized "Friends of Lyndale-Farmstead Park" were determined not to ever accomodate a dog park there, even though many, many people within walking distance of the park have used it as a de facto off-leash park for years, without any people being bitten by dogs. (Sadly, I've heard rumours of people lurking in the bushes there, waiting to leap out at unsuspecting dogs and......oh, never mind....)
Seriously, two quesrtions:
1) Do many people still see off-leash dog parks as an inappropriate use of park space?
2) Do many people fear such a use of park space in parks near to them, or near their homes (fears of noise, smell, unruly dogs or owners, lower property values, uglier park landscapes, old and familiar uses of park spaces changed to something new and unexpected)???
Dog Parks are tough to establish in areas where many people are strongly opposed due to principle or NIMBYism. I think that is the problem in my part of town.
Hmmmmm........what do our Park Board people say about this.... others interested in the topic?
-gary Hoover
Kingfield
In a message dated 4/24/02 7:55:47 PM Central Daylight Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
Eduardo asks:
> Why doesn't the Park Board cover the city
> in all quadrants with dog parks FIRST and then consider dog parks in
other
> areas.
The park board, as politicians are wont to do, is thinking of this by
the 6 Park districts, not the 4 quadrants of the city. Right now, the
6th District (SW sixth of the city, and the biggest geographic district,
I think) doesn't have a dog park.
And from my perspective (my wife was on the District 6 evaluation
committee) it looks like they never will. It blows my mind that the
Parks folks will be holding a hearing for a site that ranked 18th out of
19 after my wife and many other citizens spend months evaluating and
ranking sites! This has been a fiasco down here; there's been no visible
leadership and thus no dog park. (I don't own a dog, by the way, but the
failure to accommodate a legitimate group of users really frosts me.)
Anyway, Eduardo, I understand that you're a lot further from a dog park
than I am. But I think we're both stuck on empty in the dog-park wars,
even though we've wasted tons more time.
David Brauer
King Field
