Fort Oglethorpe discusses funding for proposed dog park
The city of Fort Oglethorpe is inching closer to adding a dog park to the community, assuming it can find the additional funding needed for the project.
The mayor and City Council first discussed the project in the summer of 2016, but Public Works and Recreation Director Jeff Long says the project has progressed over the past few months.
“We’ve looked at three or four different places, and one location we found is city-unused property that is pretty much undevelopable for anything else,” Long said. “It’s at Van Cleve Street and Patterson Avenue. We’ve talked to TVA about it already about some power lines there, and there shouldn’t be any problems.”
Long explained that the park would be a little larger than a football field.
“This park would be about 400 feet long and about 150 feet wide,” Long said. “It would also be divided into two areas for the smaller dogs and the larger dogs. To do everything that would need to be done the estimated amount would be $40,000.”
Long says the project will also include cutting in a driveway area for parking, seeding and strawing the park area, removing some trees that have overgrown the site, and then the fencing in of the actual park.
City Manager Jennifer PayneSimpkins says the city already has $15,000 from its 2017 adopted budget set aside for the project, and that there’s been discussion about trying to hold fundraisers or secure donations for the remaining $25,000.
Councilwoman Paula Stinnett brought up the possibility of looking into grants for the remainder of the needed funding.
“Are there grants available for dog parks?” Stinnett asked. “They seem to be a very popular thing. Most of the counties in this area are including dog parks.”
With the questions remaining about how to acquire the additional $25,000 needed for the project, Mayor Earl Gray suggested taking a little more time to plan out the fundraising rather than starting the project with the $15,000 already allocated, and then being pressed to secure the rest midproject.
“I’d rather start the project and complete it,” Gray said.
Following the suggestion of Gray, the council ultimately opted to table the discussion to gather more input on the matter as far as fundraising plans and community input from dog owners in the city.