Dog parks and National Park Service installations

From time to time, I mention dogs and their impact on placemaking from the standpoint that dog walking brings people out of the house and "forces" them to walk around the neighborhood, increasing the number of  people out and about, which adds to community activity and vitality.

Dogs are an element of "social bridging," and enable people to meet when they otherwise would not.

2.  People in my neighborhood are interested in creating a dog park and one person suggested approaching the National Park Service, "because they might be easier to work with than the city."

Of course, that was laughable, because the NPS is subject to more rigorous environnmental assessment processes than the DC Government process.

Flickr photo by mylerdude.

Looking into it a bit more, I discovered that there is an ongoing Dog Management Planning Process at the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, which is a mostly urban National Park Service set of installations in the San Francisco Bay region.

The more than 1200-page Environmental Assessment document produced for that process is probably the most definitive document on dog planning EXCEPT for the fact that creating one or more dedicated dog park areas was not considered at all.

-- current policy on dog walking, Golden Gate National Recreation Area

It turns out that the national law under which NPS works is that dogs can't be off-leash, although some parks, in some areas, don't enforce this prohibition.  That means no dog parks, in all likelihood, on NPS controlled property.