Chattanooga: Heritage Park Dog Park

Tell Your Dog To Save His Pennies

If you live in Chattanooga, plans are going forward to create a pay dog park at Heritage Park.

Here's a notice that was in The Chattanoogan earlier this week for the City Council meeting on October 19 where there will be a First Reading of the following Resolution:

A resolution authorizing the Department of Parks and Recreation to

enter into a Memorandum of Understanding with the McKamey Animal Care

and Adoption Center and the Chattanooga Goodwill Industries to

operate a membership-fee dog park located at Heritage Park.

According to news sources, a season pass for the park would be $50 and dogs and their owners would get "services and amenities" not available at other dog parks in the city. These would supposedly entail an on-site monitor (someone to watch the dogs play?), health screening (?), separate areas for large and small dogs (what, two fenced areas?), double-gated security (oh, to keep people out), drinking fountains for the dogs, and "commercial grade" agility equipment, whatever that means.

According to Larry Zehnder, Chattanooga Parks and Recreation Director, "This is a somewhat of something that's happening throughout the country, these kinds of specialty facilities for dogs."

Uh, no, it's not. Private or pay-to-play dog parks are relatively rare in the United States. They have only been tried at all in the last several years and, so far, opinions about them are very mixed. As you might imagine, many more affluent people are all in favor of them, while people with more modest incomes are usually wondering what their tax dollars are being used for when they can't even take their dogs to a park that they have probably helped pay for already.

Considering all of the rhetoric that Chattanooga has put forth about making the city more livable and offering amenities to its residents, it does seem very strange that they would want to charge for something as basic to human (and dog) life as a dog park. On the other hand, Chattanooga does tend to like to keep the "riff-raff" out, so maybe this is just their way of maintaining a sense of smug superiority over certain people they don't want to meet in a dog park, even if they do have dogs.

It seems to me that if Chattanooga was serious about making life better for dogs that this dog park would be freely open to all who wanted to use it.

If someone wants to have a "membership-fee" private dog park, shouldn't it be done on private property instead of city property?

It kind of makes you wonder if someone will challenge the city about this idea, too, and take them to court for keeping dogs out of a city park, doesn't it? Oh, and McKamey Animal Care and Adoption Center will be involved in running the park, so you have to wonder just how long it will be before things really go off the rails.