How to fund a brand new dog park and not destroy Lions Park in the process

I've been doing some thinking about the proposals which have been floating around town lately for a Grand Forks dog park. As you may be aware, I'm against the proposal for a fenceless dog park in the Greenway and I'm also against the proposal to turn a portion of Lions Park into a dog park. Read some of my comments under this post to see why I feel the way I do. I'm not the only person who hates seeing a neighborhood park become a dog park...check out this story.

I can only come up with one conclusion: any dog park that is to be constructed in the city limits of Grand Forks should be a fenced park not placed on top of a current park, but should be placed in a presently vacant and unused part of town. I know what some of you (including some of our city leaders) will say when you read this proposal. "It's too expensive to buy a new piece of property and put up the necessary fence and parking lot." Well, why not find creative ways for funding such a dog park?

I'm unable to find statistics (maybe I'll email someone at the city), but I believe that only a very small portion of the dogs in Grand Forks are actually licensed and that means that local government is being cheated out of a substantial funding source for such a dog park. Let's crunch some numbers.

According to Wikipedia, there are 19,677 households in the city of Grand Forks. According to this table, 36.1% of North Dakota households have dogs and those North Dakota households with dogs have an average of 1.5 dogs each. Using these figures, we see that around 7,103 Grand Forks households have dogs and there are about 10,655 dogs in the city. The cost of a license for a spayed/neutered dog in Grand Forks is $5 and, if we pretend that all dogs in Grand Forks are spayed/neutered, we arrive at a grand total of about $53,275. This means that Grand Forks dog owners should be spending a total of $53,275 each year to license their dogs. Yep, $53,275 each year. How much do you think it would cost to build a brand new state-of-the-art dog park on a vacant piece of property in Grand Forks? Well, would something like $266,000 be enough? That's the minimum of what we could have for a dog park if every dog in Grand Forks was licensed and all of the money collected for five year's worth of licenses were put together and used to pay off the construction costs of a new dog park.

I think it may be time for the city/police department to look into enforcing dog licensing and use those fees to buy the dogs and dog owners of Grand Forks a state-of-the-art dog park. Do you really think it would be too much to expect a dog owner to pay the $5 (or $15 if the animal is not spayed/neutered) that they are already legally required to pay for each dog they have and get the benefit of seeing that small fee go towards the construction of a new dog park that they could use as much as they want? I don't think it would be expecting very much at all.

Or how about this, if you don't want to offend the dog owners of Grand Forks by enforcing licensing and using that as a mechanism to finance a new dog park, why not build a new dog park on a currently vacant piece of land and then charge a small sum to the dog owners who use the park after it is constructed? It wouldn't be the first time dog owners would have to pay to use a new dog park...check out this story. I don't think it would take that long to collect enough to pay off construction costs for a brand new dog park.

Perhaps a mixture of the two funding mechanisms mentioned here would be the best option for building a new dog park on a vacant piece of land instead of turning an existing neighborhood park into the dog park. I wish that city leaders would think about my ideas. We could end up with a state-of-the-art dog park and keep the Greenway and Lions Park as they are: valuable park space in an ever expanding city.