South Loop Dog Park Action Cooperative

I went by GBP yesterday to refill the bag dispenser and noticed some things -

• The CPD Plumbing Dept has installed a valve on the water hydrant at the center of the park.  I am not a plumber, but from my conversation with Mike the plumber from the CPD my understanding is that this is a 3 ft deep freezeless water source that is designed so that the standpipe drains out when the water source is turned off for winter.  It was not installed for and it’s not designed for our application – watering dogs!   I was assured that it only takes a little pressure on the turnkey to turn off the hydrant, but on Friday, I found that I could not turn off the water source that way at all!  So, we leave the hydrant on, control the water flow with the new valve, and hope for the best!

• We can add the water timer again, but the only one I found  in the lock box was jammed up with a broken fitting.  I took it home to fix.

• People are putting poo bags in the sand container.  This is not a good thing, and we should probably move the container up by the gates (since it is a trash can…).   Perhaps it could be converted to be used as a bona fide trash container near the lock box, but I don’t know if CPD staff would clean it out.  We’ll check into this possibility.

• For some reason, people are taking the combination lock off (‘WOOF’!) and leaving it in the lock box.  What’s up with this?  Who are ‘people‘?  If long term we want to store supplies in the box, like the 1000′s of dog poo bags that we use a year at GBP, it’s going to have to be left securely locked.  This has to become practice, or else IMHO we need to put a keyed lock on the lock box sometime this summer.

• Both of the main drains were completely plugged by accumulated dog hair!  Yikes!  I found that the best way to get this up was to use a poo bag to scrape it up and then toss it in the trash.  This is a task listed in the ‘Got A Minute‘ flyer,  but clearly people at the park don’t ‘have much time’ for this – we’re going to need to come up with a better way to communicate the need to take care of this on an ongoing basis.

On May 1st,  South Loop Dog PAC coordinated with representatives of two other Chicago ‘Dog “Friendly Area’ committees, Puptown and Churchill Park, to represent Chicago dog area committees at Bark in the Park.  Some pictures from the event:

Debby Kotzen (Churchill Park) and John Lenti (Puptown) spread the word.

Pamela Focia (SLDogPAC) watches over our display.

Puptown's display of hats and T-shirts. Nice stuff.

Churchill Dog Park had T-shirts and Calendars available. The committee has a long term fund raising vision - represented by the fire hydrant waiting to be 'filled' - that should translate into some cool projects down the road.

Discussing dog issues of the day.

This seemed like a useful exercise, but we didn’t sell much, if anything.  A bunch of people took membership information from the parks they frequented, and we hope this translates into ongoing support. If we do do this again, we should be clear that the function is to raise awareness of the role of DFA Committees in maintaining the off leash areas in Chicago, not fundraising. Next time, we might want to have a banner of some sort, and try to get more of the Chicago DFA support groups involved. We do have a Facebook group already!

Some things we learned:

• By far most of the people we asked were completely unaware that all dog friendly areas in Chicago are user-supported. This is a failure of communication by the city and the Chicago Park District. We will be bringing this to their attention – all DFA license holders should understand from the moment they pick up their tag: your off leash dog park is maintained by users like you, not by the City!

• The most requested information was ‘where are the dog parks‘.  Luckily we had made one copy of a Google map that showed the location of the DFAs in Chicago, but for the future – we need more of these.  We’ll be adding a link to the map on this website soon.

• And… John Lenti of Puptown is truly a masterful ‘barker‘ (pun intended).

We’ve finally gotten the PayPal Membership payment buttons configured properly, so if you’ve been holding off renewing your membership, or want to renew now, please do! And if you’re feeling generous, or, alternatively, if you’re not up for paying a full membership right now, use the ‘Donations‘ page to make a PayPal donation in any amount!