Good news & bad news at Grant Bark Park

 Grant Bark Park  No Responses »
Oct 082009
 

IMG_0312🙂  Good news – we finally installed a ‘Dog Waste Bag Dispenser’ at Grant Bark Park and have committed to keeping it filled. If you forget a bag, feel free to take one.  And if it’s empty or near empty, please please call us, email, or tweet @sldogpac – DogPAC members are NOT going to be patrolling it on a daily basis, if that.

😥 Bad news – the water timer installed at the Bark Park has finally broken!  It lasted, what, a month!?!   But it did NOT fall apart like the first one.  Instead, it seems to have fallen victim to crappy user interface design – it looks like someone twisted it the wrong way until the internal mechanism broke.

🙂 Good news – no big deal, it’s getting colder and the Chicago Park District will probably be turning off the water soon.  And, we have another in reserve, so we’ll label that up with arrows and squares and a diagram on the back, and post the instructions when time comes to reinstall it.

😈 Grant Park 001Bad news – it seems that advertisements on the kiosk are no more – Janis Taylor of the CPD writes:

Park District staff visited the park recently and saw that there was a sign posted on the kiosk selling advertisement space (see attached). Please remove this immediately.  It is against Park District policy and, as was stated at the city-wide meeting, dfa committees are not permitted to allow companies to advertise in exchange for money or other benefits.

Thank you,

Janis

That sign has been up for, what, a couple of years?? Who knew?

 Posted by on October 8, 2009

No More Excuses at Coliseum Park…

 News  2 Responses »
Oct 032009
 

dogwastedispenserColiseum Park DFA is a mess, and there is poo everywhere.  Today we put up a Dog Waste Bag Dispenser at Coliseum Park – it’s orange, and you can’t miss it.   No more excuses, please. 🙂

The DogPAC has committed to keeping the DFA dog waste bag dispenser full of poo bags.  If you forget yours, please feel free to take one.

And, feel free to point it out to others who might ‘need a bag‘!

If it’s empty, please call us, email, or tweet @sldogpac – one of us will come out to fill it. (No, I’m not going to monitor it every day.)

Signs, we have signs!

 Grant Bark Park  1 Response »
Sep 292009
 
Sign at the south end path adjacent to the sidewalk.

Sign at the south end path adjacent to the sidewalk.

The Chicago Park District has graciously installed a sign at each of the path entrances that lead from the sidewalk to the Grant Bark park. Sure, they made an effort not to be too, too, fancy – but every little bit helps.

Sign at the East side path off Columbus St.

Sign at the East side path off Columbus St.

 Posted by on September 29, 2009

Timers, again?

 Grant Bark Park  No Responses »
Sep 112009
 

Nelson

Well the ‘Vigoro‘ mechanical water timer was no good and fell apart after a couple of days, so we’re trying the ‘Nelson’.  The Nelson doesn’t have the same kind of glued joint as the Vigoro, instead, it has a metal shim to hold the attachment fitting.  So at least it’s not going to break apart the same way but maybe it’ll find some other way to fall apart.  We’ll see.  If you find it broken, please take a brief look at it and then let us know what happened.




 Posted by on September 11, 2009

Coliseum dog park update

 News  4 Responses »
Sep 082009
 

This is a brief update about issues at Coliseum Park after discussion with Janis Taylor of the Chicago Park District 9.8.09.

1.  The east side gate.gate_gap

The issues raised here were:

  1. the need to fix the gap that currently allows small dogs to escape the dog run (note the brick in the picture!)
  2. the possibility of installing a double gated entry here to make the park secure.

Janis reports that CPD personnel have taken a look at the gate.

They are most likely going to close off the gate, because it opens onto the children’s playground (which is contrary to current ‘DFA’ policy).

This will leave the park with one double-gated entry at the north end.


2. The depressions around the drains.depressions_around_drain

The issue raised here was that these retain dirty water and allow bacteria and parasites to collect and possibly spread disease.  This issue was initially reported to CPD over two years ago.

Janis reports that CPD personnel think that they “are not that low”.

When pressed, she agreed that CPD policy was not to allow pools of contaminated water at DFAs (as occurs around the drains and at other points in the dog run).  Janis said that she would  look into this again.

3.  The water fountain. water_fountain_decay

The issue raised here is that the water fountain is rusted and decaying, and that there is no doggie water fountain.

Janis suggests that maybe if they can find one lying around, maybe a concrete fountain, they might install it. We have heard that at other Chicago DFA’s ‘replacement’ of a water fountain consisted of installing another used fountain in place of the existing one. This will probably not make anyone happy.

The alternative is for the DogPAC and the user community to purchase a fountain.  CPD will  not cost share on this.  CPD plumbers will have to install it.  A weather resistant outdoor fountain costs on the order of $3000.

Water timers installed at Grant Bark Park

 Grant Bark Park  5 Responses »
Aug 202009
 
timer_1

The timer is installed at ground level at the central source.

Thanks to the CPD plumbing department, the central water at Grant Bark Park is now running off a mechanical timer. The timer was installed to address the longstanding ‘issue’ of the water hydrant being left on 24/7 to run the improvised fountain at the center of the park. It works beautifully.

f57bcb69-cda7-46ed-9303-05d123acecb4_300

Vigoro mechanical timer

The water flow is controlled by a simple egg-timer mechanism, and it can be set to shut off water flow after 15 minutes to 2 hours. The connections look to be leak-free, so there should never be a need to shut water off at the source. (There are two wrenches for the source stored in the lockbox).

Please try to use this timer, and to educate others how to use it: you want your dogs to play in a water fountain, you turn the dial, and you can leave the park without worry or guilt!

The flow timer is plastic, and we don’t know how long it will last in the weather, or whether it will break due to heavy or clumsy use. That’s fine – they are cheap ($14.77 at Home Depot), and if over time the mechanical timer works well as a way to regulate the water from the central source, the Dog PAC will budget to replace them periodically as necessary. If you see that it’s broken – contact us!

We’ve also installed a timer at the water fountain spigot. The hose is connected to a sprinkler now, but we imagine that long term the hose may just be left unattached for filling up water bowls (and, if we get our act together, for filling up wading pools).

timer_2

Timer installed at the faucet off the drinking fountain

 Posted by on August 20, 2009

Drains above ground?

 Grant Bark Park, News  2 Responses »
Aug 182009
 

Wow, take a look at the drain installation at the Grant Bark Park:

barkparkdrain

The drain entrance is above the surrounding asphalt!

Look at the front of that drain – there is an obvious lip that extends above the surface of the surrounding asphalt, allowing water to pool and accumulate debris, bacteria, and parasites.

And it’s even worse at the Coliseum Park DFA:

depressions_around_drain

The drain is surrounded by a depression that holds water!

Is this shoddy work, or what (sure, it could be ‘natural settling of the asphalt’)?

There’s already been a report of someone suspecting that their dog acquired Giardia from nosing around the drain at the Grant Bark Park.  Now, I’ve always heard that rabbit droppings (yum!) were the more serious threat for Giardia, but whatever.

These are defects that shouldn’t be allowed to persist.  Here’s the thing – the issue with the Coliseum Park DFA drains was reported to the Chicago Park District over two years ago (by email, dated 5.1.07).  Nothing has been done since.

So, what do we do?  As far as I can tell, repairing these defects is clearly an obligation of the Chicago Park District under the terms of the agreement that they make with the community groups managing the ‘DFA’s.  See here, ‘Maintenance of Capital Projects’ including ‘sewer repair’ and ‘asphalt replacement’.  Perhaps the solution is simply to keep bringing this to their attention, every week, every month, until it gets done?

That takes some effort. And it would help if we could log our requests with the CPD, so that everyone could keep track of the status of the issues that have been raised.

Consider this the first entry in that ‘log’ – the Coliseum Park DFA drain defect was raised again with Janis Taylor of the CPD on Friday 8.14.09 (photographs emailed 8.17.09).  She was notified of the Bark Park drain defect by email, 8.18.09.

Guidelines

 News  No Responses »
Aug 142009
 

The Chicago Park District guidelines for DFA committees, including the South Loop Dog PAC, are explicitly laid out in the CPD DFA guidelines document.  A copy of the  document, dated 4.22.2008, has been uploaded to the website and it is available for download.  The new guidelines page outlines the responsibilities of the Dog PAC with respect to maintenance of the Grant Bark Park and the Coliseum Park DFA.   It’s up to us, folks!

 Posted by on August 14, 2009

Bad links are fixed…

 News  No Responses »
Jul 312009
 

OK, I’ve tried to fix all the bad links that carried over when the site was moved from the development tree to the live site.

Please let us know if you find a problem with the website or with particular links.  The PayPal links do not work yet!

And, when we ask for ‘feedback’ we really mean it!   Don’t like the colors?  Want more information about something?  Don’t like the site organization?  Then, please email or comment.  We need your input to make this website useful to our community.

Please spread the word, register, and participate!  Thanks.


A proposed site hosted at Mocha, but managed using WordPress

 Board, News  1 Response »
May 122009
 

This is a draft of a WordPress managed South Loop Dog PAC site.  It doesn’t look good yet, but it has all the text content of the original site.  Notice that although WordPress is a ‘blogging’ enviroment, we can introduce Pages (see navigation at top) to structure the site as a website.  We can also have a blog and RSS feed to update members and the community about events and issues. 

The advantage of a site like this is that it can be managed from the web interface, rather than using desktop software.  That means that multiple volunteer contributors can help maintain the site, rather than one dedicated web designer. In the future, we should be able to add a number of features to the site, and also be able to easily reconfigure the overall look.  WordPress uses Themes to configure the overall look, and we can either download them or modify them for our own use.

By configuring the site on this server (MochaHost), we will be able to implement the long term vision of having a user database hosted here (implemented with MySql), and setting up the  southloopdogpac.org email addresses. The cPanel control of the MochaHost site is actually pretty nice.

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