The Ward Park planning meeting was as bad as it could possibly have been. We were told that the city will only provide $5,000 in total for the project. That is for everything including construction, signage, maintenance, and any other expenses. The city's own estimates call for $15-20,000 to simply fence an acre and maintain it at Ward Park.
This means that there will be no Ward Park off-leash area and it is unlikely that any dog run will be feasible anywhere in the city.
That is not an exaggeration. The Parks Planning office has effectively decided to eliminate the community dog park project by underfunding it.
Since Ward Park is not in the cards, the meeting was very short. We talked briefly about other options and ways to work around the funding limitations. We are going to have to get creative to make anything happen, but it is clear that nothing will happen soon.
I am outraged by this and I'm sure most of you are too. After a decade of foot-dragging and repeated promises that never materialize, they have again pushed dog-owning tax payers to the side.
The decision to provide less than a third of the city's own estimates for this project seems to have come from higher up in the organization. We need to contact the city en masse to demand that they stop treating us like we are unimportant and start making good on their promises. I'll be posting an action item on this very soon. For now I just wanted to let everyone know where we stand.
This is every bit as bad as it sounds.
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4 comments:
WHAT?! WTF?!
Sorry I couldn't be there -Ede ran off in the Barton Nature Area and didn't return for half an hour, at which point it was 7 pm.
This is ludicrous, simply ludicrous. We have to do something. Can Amy tell us where in the "higher up" this came from? Can we come up with some of the funding ourselves? Corporate sponsors?
I deleted the earlier posts because I made an error in my mental arithmetic. Fencing a one acre square would require about 800 linear feet of fence. Running one of the fencing cost estimator programs on the web I got a cost estimate of $11,000.
The Farmers Market is about one acre, one might question if you really need this much space.
I think the real problem is maintenance. Not everyone will pick up after their pup. No one wants to be the pooper scooper person so lets just kill the project.
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