Keeping open space fit for wildlife
The open space serves as shortgrass prairie habitat for the black-tailed prairie dog, bald eagle, western burrowing owl and northern leopard frog. Trying to keep it fit for wildlife is a tough slog in the face of a daily onslaught of dogs, said city spokesman Andy Le.
Dogs flush out grounddwelling birds, and their nitrogen-rich feces promote “the growth of nonnative plants at the expense of native plants,” according to a city study released late last year.
The city hauled 350,000 pounds of dog waste out of the open space property in 2023, Le said. Some of the dog poop never made it to a trash can.
When the city began assembling Westminster Hills Open Space in phases, with the first land purchase made in 1988, officials say, it was never intended to be a dog park. It now spans 1,000-plus acres.
The property became canine-friendly in 2000 when the city launched a one-year pilot for an off-leash area on 27 acres. The city expanded the off-leash zone to the entire open space property in 2008, before dialing it back to just more than 400 acres the next year in response to numerous coyote-dog encounters.
“It’s an open space that has been used informally as a dog park — but it is not a dog park,” Le said. “We want everybody to enjoy the open space but we have to come up with a set of rules that everyone can agree to that stops the degradation of the land.” But Ireland said the challenge now facing Westminster’s land management officials is that “it’s hard to take away something that people have used for that long.”
This isn’t the first time a Front Range community has rallied around the future of an off-leash dog facility. In 2017, hundreds of residents in and around Evergreen fought for months to save the popular 107acre Elk Meadow Park for untethered dogs.
Jefferson County Open Space officials floated a proposal to limit loose dogs to an 8-acre section of the park but ultimately decided to close the entire park to off-leash use. Elk Meadow saw as many as 400 people and their dogs each day, causing parking headaches and safety hazards for those crossing the road from the parking lot to the park.
Matt Robbins, a spokesman for Jefferson County’s Parks and Conservation Department, said the challenges for land managers were the steep topography of the park and spiking levels of E. coli, caused by dog feces measured in the hundreds of pounds, in an intermittent stream that ran through the property.
But “awful” is how Betsy Rich, an Evergreen resident, described the park’s closure. She led the fight seven years ago to keep Elk Meadow open, and she still disputes the level of contamination the county cited for its shutdown.
“Not only was it a place to exercise your dog, it was the center of the community for so many of us,” she said. “Those were who your friends were.”