Let’s make Billings a dog-friendly city. Let’s do it for the little girl.
I come before you today to admit that I am a lawbreaker.
Since our family acquired our first dog about 15 years ago, I would estimate that I have broken the local ordinance prohibiting dogs in city parks at least 300 times. I could have broken it that many times in Pioneer Park alone.
Mrs. Kemmick, who is the real dog walker in the family, might have three times that many violations. When it comes to the dog ban in city parks, Mrs. Kemmick is a regular Al Capone.
Except for the ban on cell phone use by motorists, I can’t think of another law so widely disregarded, and most people are at least aware of the cell phone law. Even Jon Thompson, the city’s superintendent of parks, admitted at an Animal Control Board meeting last month that when he moved here from Great Falls, he broke the law on dogs in parks before he learned of its existence.
He spoke at a hearing the board called as it works to decide whether to send the City Council a recommendation to lift the ban on dogs in city parks. I’m hoping the board makes such a recommendation and that the City Council repeals the ordinance.
It’s hard to believe that lifting the ban would bring that many more dogs into the parks, given how often the law is ignored now. People would still have to keep their dogs on leashes and pick up after them, just as they are now required to do when walking them on city sidewalks.
People who support the ban point to all the irresponsible pet owners who never pick up after their dogs, or let their dogs run without a leash. Those people are going to continue their bad habits with or without a ban. Why punish responsible pet owners because of those miscreants?
I’ll bet Thompson carried poop bags when he took his dog to city parks, as we do when we’re out of the house with our dogs. With the ban in place, people too lazy to do the right thing probably figure that if the ban is a joke, so are the subsidiary rules about leashes and picking up after your dogs.
At that meeting in October, Animal Control Supervisor Dave Klein said he has only five officers, who have plenty to do besides write citations for ordinance violations.
That may be, but perhaps if the ban were lifted there could be aggressive enforcement for a few months, to raise public awareness about leash laws and cleanup requirements.
A hefty fine, similar to the $110 first-time fine for cell phone violations, would do much to publicize the law, and it would punish a few knotheads as well. (I say this from the perspective of one of the knotheads who paid the cell-phone fine. It hurt, and I felt deeply stupid.)
Years ago, I was playing tennis at Pioneer Park when I saw a man who walked over from one of the alphabet streets and was letting his dog unburden himself just inside the park. Suddenly, one of the parks maintenance workers came roaring up on his four-wheeler, skidded to a halt near the startled dog owner and jumped out of the vehicle.
In a very loud, passionate voice, the park worker proceeded to dress down the dog owner, saying he’d watched him bring his dog to the park day after day without ever cleaning up after it. The dog owner, apparently guilty on all counts, was speechless. He still didn’t clean up because of course he wasn’t carrying any bags, but he was embarrassed as hell, and I can’t imagine he dared repeat the infraction, at least not at Pioneer.
That’s the kind of enforcement I’d like to see more of.
And while the Animal Control Board and the City Council are at it, why don’t they vote to create the largest, cheapest dog park in Montana? Norm’s Island, which is just upstream of Riverfront Park, is technically a city park, and dogs technically are not allowed there.
But hundreds of people take hundreds of dogs there every day. There are several bag dispensers and several garbage cans along the 2-mile trail that runs along the perimeter of the island, and there are signs urging people to use the bags and the garbage cans.
To make it an official dog park, all the city would have to do is declare it one and then put a gate on the only bridge to the island. Voila! A 60-acre dog park for a few hundred bucks.
Or the city could continue to maintain the fiction that dogs are banned from the island, just as it pretends that all parks are off limits to dogs.
Call me an optimist, but I think a good law with some enforcement is better than a bad law with none.
