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Margate adopts dog park rules after hearing list of complaints
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MARGATE - Neighbors of the city's new dog park took a litany of complaints, big and small, to the City Commission on Thursday, and city officials agreed to do something about a few of the small ones.
Residents brought up everything from legal objections to the dog park's existence - including a request to shut it down two weeks after it opened - to practical ideas for improvements to a facility that has generated controversy in its neighborhood since before the city started building it.
Nancy Taddei, who lives near the park, told the commissioners that dispensers and receptacles for plastic bags - available to give dog owners a way to clean up their pets' waste - were formerly stationed out on the street near what's now the dog park. But since the park opened Oct. 23, she said, the waste-bag setups have been moved inside the locked gates. Commissioner Dan Campbell said the city has ordered replacements, which will be put back outside the dog park.
Taddei also said dog-park users were not following a city rule banning children younger than 12 from being in the fenced-in dog-running area.
Joann Bonanni, a neighbor who has opposed the park for months, suggested that as long as the city now has a dog park, it should put up a sign directing people to it. She said an important intersection is unmarked and drivers have been causing traffic problems by going the wrong way on one-way streets looking for the new park. That led police Chief David Wolfson and Mayor Mike Becker to promise that the city will improve signs in the area.
But the commissioners weren't as agreeable when another neighbor, Tom Vickers, said the city should shut the park until it goes through the legal process of applying to the town's Planning Board to build it. He said the city also needs state environmental permits to make the facility legal, because it's near wetlands areas.
Vickers and another opponent, John Sewell, also objected that the city's zoning officer/land-use administrator, Roger Rubin, didn't have the proper credentials to have a role in planning the park. Rubin has acknowledged that he let his state license as a professional planner lapse in 2002, and the city requires that its land-use administrator be a state-licensed planner.
The Planning Board has since recommended that the town drop the land-use-administrator position - which is not required by state law - and fold its duties into the zoning-officer job, which is a state-required position. The commission is expected to take up that legal change soon.
Sewell, a frequent critic of the commissioners, also argued that the city risks being sued if police don't enforce the rule against letting children younger than 12 in the dog park.
In a related matter, the commissioners also adopted an ordinance outlining the rules for the new park. They include that ban on children younger than 12, park hours from
8 a.m. to dusk and a $30 annual fee for access to the park.
The park is also open only to Margate residents under the ordinance - despite another complaint the commission got Thursday from a resident of the Shalom House, a senior-citizens' apartment building on the Ventnor side of a city line that runs less than a block away from the dog park.
"I live half a block from Margate," Marilyn Berger told the commissioners - holding a small, brown dog in her arms as she spoke. "So I'm disappointed ... that I can't be allowed to use the Margate dog park."
The mayor confirmed that the rules say the park is open only to dogs owned by Margate residents. But he suggested that rule could be changed in the future.
Contact Martin DeAngelis:
609-272-7237
Posted in Atlantic on Friday, November 6, 2009 2:10 am
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