City Council: Citizens Demand A Plan For An Off-Leash Dog Park!

Piedmont is in the throes of figuring out how to preserve its off-leash dog areas for future generations.  The major concern seems to be how to preserve the vegetated slopes in these areas – think of the slopes above Bushy Dell Creek in Piedmont Park, the slopes of the redwood grove in Dracena Park and the slopes above Linda Avenue in that now defunct dog park.  Some may know that Piedmont derives its name from its similarity to the Piedmont region in Italy, a region known for its hills and natural beauty.  One wonders – what does this hilly Piedmont do for dog parks? See Italy for examples and I personally volunteer to lead a city task force to the area to learn how our “sister city” runs dog parks.

Alternatively, city staff could look around the bay area to see what other cities are doing with sloped dog parks.  In the east bay there are many examples but most are on large tracks of East Bay MUD or East Bay Regional Parks land far from residences and not particularly relevant to Piedmont’s situation.  San Francisco is known to have a few hills and has some creative approaches to maintaining dog areas on slopes that Piedmont could learn from:

Alta Plaza Dog Play Area: zoom in and see how the dog area is transected by a series of sidewalks which provide access and slope stabilization.  Were the Linda Park dog park redesigned to run across rather than down slope, this park could function without the run-off issues.

Glen Canyon Park: a tree-covered canyon trail leading from city tennis courts down to a high school track. Sound familiar?  To maintain slopes here, dogs are kept on leash but at either ends of the trails are flatter areas that could be made into off-leash fenced dog areas.  There’s currently a dog area at one end of Piedmont Park (with room to spare for more).

Alamo Square Dog Play Area:  a sloped lawn surrounded by walkways with dogs confined to the lawn by vegetation beds.  It looks like the upper lawn at Dracena Park.

Pine Lake Park Dog Park:  a flat lawn area with adjacent parking located as far as possible from the sensitive pond area.  Blair Park?

St Mary’s Dog Park:  a fenced dog park within the recreation complex.  This design looks like it could dove-tail with all the fencing up at Hampton Park.

Visit Rover to learn more about these parks.  So there are ways to deal with slopes in off-leash dog areas.  What Piedmont needs to do, first and foremost, is create more off-leash dog area. The partial and now final closure of the Linda Dog Park correlates perfectly with the degradation of slopes at the other dog parks and violation of on-leash rules at Piedmont and Crocker Parks.  More dog parks is the obvious first step the city should take to preserve its current dog areas for the future.  

In developing the Sustainable Parks Master Plan (SPMP), the community was surveyed about what it likes about the parks and natural, tree-lined off-leash dog areas was the top-ranked amenity.  The SMSP will help but can’t possibly solve the degradation issues without restricting off-leash activity in the current dog areas.  Council seems to understand this – when Linda Dog Park was closed, a majority of Council recommended that a fenced off-leash area at the Oakland Avenue bridge be included in the SPMP but that appears not to have happened.  

Staff is currently preparing the 2026-27 budget for Council deliberation this June. Now would be the time for Council to reiterate its request that staff study the viability of off-leash areas at the Oakland Bridge and elsewhere in town.  And now is a particularly propitious time to do so. No offense to past Park Commissioners (myself included) but the current Park Commission has assembled the best landscape management and design talent and committed volunteers to ever be on the Commission.  For inclusion in the upcoming budget discussions, Council or the city administrator should direct staff to get going with finding more off-leash dog areas in town while we have this talent assembled.  What will future generations say if we miss this opportunity?