Justin Botejue and Sam Mace: Underhill dog park a lose-lose for dog owners and community
By Justin Botejue and Sam Mace
The Spokane Parks Board is slated to choose a site for a dog park in Spokane South Hill/East Central neighborhoods. The selection of Underhill Park as a potential dog park site demonstrates that this process is flawed and needs a pause.
The temporary South Hill dog park is slated for closure as the Carla Peperzak Middle School construction nears completion. Three sites have been proposed for a 7-acre (or more) fenced, off-leash dog park: Hazel’s Creek, Lincoln Park and Underhill Park. All three sites would require the destruction of bird and wildlife habitat, native vegetation, pollinators, trees and much-loved walking trails. All three sites would also necessarily require major improvements for right-of-way, accessibility, parking, waste removal and many other infrastructure changes that have yet to be fully thought through.
East Central’s support for protecting Underhill’s current uses and natural area has been made abundantly clear. The East Central Neighborhood Council passed a resolution this past week opposing a dog park in Underhill. The last dog park public meeting reflected how passionate the neighborhood feels about its limited open spaces. Parents, kids, park users and neighbors attended in force, sharing how the natural area is currently used and loved.
We hope that the Parks Department makes good on their promise to listen carefully to the voices of the citizens when the Parks Board meets Monday to discuss choosing a site. The department needs to refer back to its own dog park public survey that showed 79% of respondents would prefer dog parks be located on already developed land, not natural areas. With such strong resident support for preserving natural land, we are astonished that the three proposed sites would be considered at all.
Underhill Park, however, faces the most disruption if a dog park is added. From Little League All Star games in the summer to sledding down the legendary hillside in the winter, Underhill is perhaps one of the most utilized multi-use parks. On any given summer afternoon, a visitor is often hard-pressed to find parking along the neighborhood streets surrounding Underhill Park, not to even mention the small parking lot onsite. Adding a dog park to an already busy site would compromise beloved current activities. Visiting families, especially children, enjoy walking along the rocky cliffs and hilly natural areas surrounding the playing fields during games. It is this natural area in particular that is proposed for dog park development, most of which would be inaccessible to people with different abilities and mobilities.
The concept of accessibility raises a larger, more pressing issue that has yet to be addressed – the definite negative impact to the diverse racial-ethnic and socioeconomic identity of the East Central neighborhood. A dog park in Underhill Park is necessarily an equity issue when the statistics are considered. The ZIP code surrounding Underhill Park, 99202, is one of the most diverse neighborhoods in Spokane. According to the 2020 Census, 23.3% of people in 99202 are persons of color. Furthermore, 26% of the people experience poverty and 48.1% are renter households. For many children in this neighborhood, Underhill Park is their only experience of nature and the outdoors.
Despite these stats, East Central is remarkably resilient. While Underhill might be known more commonly known for baseball and rugby, it is lesser known that it is also home to the only cricket pitch in the Inland Northwest and is frequently used by our South Asian population. Underhill also is the main gathering place for frequent large picnics by our Marshallese friends and neighbors. Families from across the globe settled in our neighborhood by World Relief call Underhill Park home. Adding a dog park would deal an unrecoverable blow to an already disadvantaged neighborhood.
We love our dogs and, clearly, we need more accessible dog parks across our neighborhoods. We also believe there is a way to achieve this without destroying our limited urban natural areas or displacing established community and cultural activities. We encourage readers to reach out to their council members and share your voice.
We continue to encourage the talent of our Parks Department to not settle for politically expedient shortcuts for this complex solution but to rather continue looking for creative, collaborative solutions that follow a community-informed process. Spokane is “Creative by Nature” – lets keep it that way.
Michelle Welch and Robin Keizer contributed to this guest opinion column. Justin Botejue, Sam Mace, Welch and Keizer live in the East Central neighborhood and are active in the Friends of Underhill Park.