Washougal will soon have a dog park once again.
Unfortunately, it might only be for four months.
The Dog Owners Group for Park Access in Washington, known as DOGPAW, put an announcement on Facebook on Tuesday that the Stevenson Off Leash Dog Park will reopen Monday and remain open through April 28.
The park, at 2801 Addy St., closed on Nov. 1, and the city has been without a dog park since.
The park opened in 2010 on land owned by the Stevenson family. They sold about 15 acres, including the park, to East Village Investors, a limited liability corporation run by Lone Wolf Investments, for $7.08 million in 2012.
Wes Hickey, owner of Lone Wolf, said the two sides had some discussions in recent weeks to reopen the park temporarily, even though his company has plans to redevelop that plot of land in the future. Hickey said he’s still looking at different ideas and multi-use plans for that area.
“We’ll probably start some preliminary geotech engineering work after DOGPAW moves off in the end of April,” he said.
In the meantime, the city and DOGPAW are back to a familiar place: trying to find a more permanent location for the park.
“It is an ongoing search,” Suzanne Grover, Washougal’s parks, cemetery and facilities manager, said. “Right now, we’re hoping a private land owner would be willing to partner with us. We’ve exhausted the large parcels that are around town in a central location that would be beneficial for a dog park. We could maybe go smaller scale and utilize some smaller parcels in the city so that there are little micro dog parks here and there.”
Since the Stevenson park closed, Grover has heard of an increase in off-leash dogs running around other parks, which is not allowed in Washougal.
“It’s really impacting everything when we don’t have a suitable location for our dogs to run off leash,” she said. “Even people who don’t have dogs have commented about how sad they are (that the) park is closed because they liked going by and seeing all the dogs run around.”
