Town Square Park: Going to the Dogs?

Dogs have been defecating and urinating throughout the Town Square Park since it opened a few years ago. Signs in the Park require dog walkers to pick up feces their dogs drop, but my wife and I see more and more dog feces left in the park. We find such droppings particularly annoying in the large grassy area in the southwest corner of the Park and on the concrete sidewalks in the park.

Dog feces on the sidewalks annoy us because we have to watch carefully to avoid stepping in them and then tracking them into our home. Dog feces in the large grassy area annoy us because, in nice weather, we see many people--especially children--running, playing, and rolling in the grass in the same spots where we have seen dogs defecating and urinating. That can’t be good from a public health standpoint.

Those in charge of the park are considering creating a dog relief area (or “drop zone”) in the little-used northwest corner of the park. People walking dogs in the Park would take their dogs first to that dog relief area before taking their dogs anywhere else in the Park. If dogs must be allowed to use the park, this seems like an improvement, but in my view, dogs should be permitted nowhere in the park except in that dog relief area.

At a meeting on the issue last night, there was controversy regarding where in the Park the dog relief area should be located. A sizable faction of the people at that meeting supported locating that dog relief area in the west third of the large grassy area in the southwest corner of the Park. As the lesser evil, I would prefer continuing to let dogs relieve themselves throughout the Park rather than making a third of that much-used grassy area into the dog relief area.

If you have comments on this issue, please register in my forum and make your comments in this thread: http://mstcuoa.proboards.com/index.cgi?action=display&board=general&thread=18&page=1 Or, if you prefer, email your comments to me at rasmussen305@gmail.com.