Parks & Playgrounds Q&A
Q: Have you seen the need for a separate
small dog area in dog parks?
A: No. I have seen several dog parks with
separate small dog areas included and
have never seen a dog in them, but I have
seen small dogs in the big dog areas at
these same dog parks.
This is not to say
that a small dog area is never used, but
most dog owners (big or small) want
their dogs to socialize with other dogs as
well as socializing themselves with other
people.
If the dogs and people are not in
the small dog area the small dogs for the
most part will not be there either.
—Randy Burkhardt
Q: Is there a more economical way to
provide bags to pick up dog waste?
A: Yes. There are several designs of bag
dispensers out there now that utilize
PVC pipe and grocery bags that are provided
by the users. I feel that this will
work as a supplement to the commercial
bags that we provide in our dog parks,
but we would not want to rely solely on
the users to provide the bags.
Our maintenance
and ranger staff check the bags
daily and refill the commercial dispensing
boxes.
If the users were relied upon
solely to furnish the bags there would be
no way to monitor if there was a need for
more bags, and if no bags are present
users cannot be expected to clean up
their dog’s waste.
—Randy Burkhardt
Q: Is there a way to keep the turf in good
condition in dog parks that are used all
day long?
A: Yes. We found that by thinking of the
dog park as a sports field and treating
them as such we have been able to keep
our turf in reasonably good condition.
This includes installing irrigated blue
grass turf and maintaining as we would
any of our sports fields.
We also split our
dog parks in to two sides, only having
one side open at a time and rotating from
one side to the other. This allows our
maintenance staff to work on getting one
side to recover through aeration, fertilization
and over seeding when needed while
the other side is open to users.
We do not
have a set rotation schedule, but allow
our maintenance staff to make that decision
based on the condition of the turf.
—Randy Burkhardt
Q: Naming of parks can be an interesting,
political and complicated process.
What process do you have to name a
park?
A: We have a rapidly growing park system
in Wisconsin’s fastest growing city of
25,000. Our growth is headed for
35,000+ by the year 2020, and with this
growth we will continue to acquire more
parkland as we have in the past several
years.
Up until three years ago, the
responsibility of naming parks being
accepted into our park system was primarily
under my direction.
Prior to that
time, parks were primarily named after
the name of the development they were
in, such as Royal Oak Park, which was in
the Royal Oak development.
As a result,
upon arriving in my position over 26
years ago, I inherited a parks system that
had park names of Royal Oak 1, Royal
Oak 2 and Royal Oak 3. Needless to say
these names didn’t last long as I developed
a re-name the park contest with the
elementary school located in the neighborhood
(also called Royal Oak).
This
contest worked well. During the past several
years, we have taken on several more
park areas and have tried to be creative in
naming these new parks by sponsoring
additional name the parks contests in the
schools, having the new development
residents submit names for their neighborhood
park or having staff submit
names for consideration by our Parks,
Recreation & Forestry Commission.
Contest winners were rewarded with season
passes to our family aquatic center.
Various degrees of success with this
method resulted.
I developed our Parks
Naming Policy that was adopted in 2002
that would govern existing and new
parks and special use areas within a park
that were not named, such as ball diamonds,
skateboard facilities, and so on.
With the input of several of my professional
colleagues that I asked for assistance
from, this process came to its final
product.
Included within the Parks
Naming Policy are sections on the
Purpose, Authorization, Objectives,
Qualifying Names, Naming Process of
Existing Un-named Facilities, Naming
Process of New Facilities and Signs,
Plaques and Markers.
The policy
described here sets a wide range of criteria
for what is and is not an acceptable
name, along with submitting the justification
for the name.
We have used it
three times to date with the names of
Orfan Community Park, Stoneridge
Estates Community Park and Windy
Ridge Neighborhood Park emerging as
the park names selected.
In the interest of
space for this publication, please contact
me at rholling@cityofsunprairie.com
and I will send you a copy of our Park
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