Dogs are complicated. For some people, they’re members of the family: intelligent, playful mammals who deserve full, active lives. To others, dogs are primarily a nuisance: loud, unpredictable, sometimes threatening or dangerous and prone to leaving waste where one steps.
This dichotomy, along with the spectrum of opinion in between, makes the idea of dog parks complicated. The town’s first dog park at the end of Pine Street never really caught on. It wasn’t centrally located enough to become popular. Currently, dog owners congregate in the mornings and let their dogs run free in places where it’s not technically allowed, such as Perry Park near Bird’s Hill, Mills Field, and the field behind the decommissioned Hillside School, among other locations.
At the Select Board meeting last week, a trio of town officials — Carys Lustig, director of public works; Stacey Mulroy, director of Park & Recreation; and Thomas Ryder, town engineer, representing the Active Recreation Assets Working Group — presented ideas for legalized canine recreation. They had considered about half a dozen sites, they reported, and believe there are two good options for fairly large (up to two acres), fenced-in dog runs, commonly called “bark parks” for the mulch used and the dogs’ participation.
But they also had an unfenced idea: designating part of the trail and the meadow near Rosemary Lake as an off-leash trail, not a bark park. While bark parks at either of the two likely locations — behind Hillside and on the Mills Field parkland alongside the tennis courts and baseball field — would require hundreds of thousands of dollars for fencing, mulching, water fountains, etc., the Rosemary trail would only require approval by abutters — many of whom are well up a steep hillside from the trail — a vote and some signage. The cost? “Probably under $10,000,” said Lustig.
The bark parks would warrant sidewalk and parking upgrades, said Ryder, and costs could get as high as $900,000. Those projects would take years to plan and fund. Given current capital plans, Town Manager Kate Fitzpatrick reported it would likely be 2030 before the project could begin.
Like the other two identified areas, the Rosemary Trail is commonly used by dog walkers now, including Select Board Chair Kevin Keane who told the town officials, “I’m a big fan of the Rosemary one.”
Many communities have trails where dogs are allowed off leash. “We’re thinking it’s the part that’s down in the big open meadow. That used to be a Girl Scout camp,” said Mulroy. “I think what we would do is make sure that people kept their dogs on leash until they got to a certain point on the trail.”
“My dogs are terrible at going up hills,” said Keane. “They could never go up the slope to the abutters because it’s so steep.”
He also reported the trail is a “sprained ankle place.”
“I think it’s a much safer thing to have your dog off leash than trying to have it on a leash around Rosemary.”
Do dogs and their owners deserve any dedicated land use or investment from the town? Last year, the town clerk’s office issued 3,422 dog licenses. As a comparison, 4,689 Needham households include a child.
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