An honest look at what the data on this site shows — and what I think the city should do about it. This is opinion. Everything else on this site is factual reference.
I'll be upfront: I own dogs, I walk them in Seattle's parks, and I have a strong opinion about how the city has managed off-leash access. The data pages on this site are deliberately neutral. This page is not. But the position below is built on six principles I believe are defensible on their own merits, and three opinions that fall out of the evidence already gathered here. The recommendation is what I've shared with the city, with neighborhood council candidates, and with Seattle Parks & Recreation multiple times since 2014.
Before laying out the case, I want to say something I think gets lost in advocacy writing on this topic.
This is a genuinely hard problem. There is no clean answer that leaves everyone satisfied. Park space in a dense, land-scarce city is finite, and the people asking for more of it — dog owners, soccer leagues, community gardeners, neighbors who want a quiet lawn to read on, kids who want a playground, unhoused residents who need somewhere to exist, runners, cyclists, birders — all have legitimate claims. Every one of them can point to data that says they're under-served. Several of them are right simultaneously.
I have real empathy for the council members, mayors, and SPR staff who have taken a run at this over the last two decades. They have tried. They have held listening sessions, commissioned studies, drafted plans, opened a dog park or two, absorbed the complaints from everyone who didn't get what they wanted, and moved on to the next file on a desk that is never empty. If you sit down with this issue in good faith and try to reason your way to a solution, you run into the same walls every time: land, money, competing uses, neighborhood opposition, a legal framework that makes time-sharing parks harder than it should be, and a constituency of dog owners who are disorganized compared to the groups lined up on the other side. Anyone who engages with this seriously discovers quickly why the easy answers aren't easy.
And the honest truth is that not everyone can leave happy. Any real change here will upset someone. A policy that gives dogs more access will feel like a loss to people who prefer parks without them. A policy that protects the status quo leaves 150,000+ dogs and their owners in exactly the position the rest of this site documents. There is no version of this where no one is disappointed.
So I'm not writing this to claim I have the perfect answer, or to suggest the people who've tried before were foolish for not finding it. I don't, and they weren't. What I am saying is that after twenty years of running the same playbook — study, listen, build one park, repeat — the data on this site shows the playbook isn't closing the gap. It isn't even keeping pace. At some point, continuing to run a strategy that measurably isn't working becomes its own choice.
That's why this editorial exists. Not to argue that the answer is obvious — it isn't — but to argue that trying something different is overdue, and that the specific different thing worth trying (a time-zoned shared-use model, borrowed from cities that have run it for decades) deserves a real look rather than a reflexive no. The sections below lay out what I think the data supports, and what I'd like the city to consider.
These aren't numbers — they're values plus factual observations. I think most reasonable Seattle residents, dog owners and non-owners alike, can agree with them.
The city has added one net dog park in fifteen years while the population grew by 34%. Two more open in fall 2026. Even with every site SPR has on the books eventually built, the per-capita gap to Portland, San Francisco, and Vancouver BC doesn't close. The constraint is physical — Seattle is a dense, land-scarce city with expensive parcels and an already-extensive park system to maintain.
Seattle is in the middle of a long housing-affordability crisis and an ongoing homelessness emergency. When a rare parcel of city land becomes available, the case for housing, shelter, or services is stronger than the case for a new fenced dog park. I own dogs and I still believe this. Any serious plan to improve off-leash access has to start from the assumption that we will not get more than a handful of small new OLAs over the coming decade.
Let me state the obvious piece first: yes, kids should be prioritized over dogs. Most reasonable people agree. A city with 157 playgrounds and 14 dog parks is making a choice about who its parks are for, and on the first axis — kids first — that choice is correct. This principle is not arguing for a 1:1 split.
It is arguing that the magnitude of the gap has gone beyond any reasonable prioritization. Widely cited estimates put Seattle's dog population at around 150,000 as a floor, with SPR's own 2023 Expansion Study citing figures up to 400,000. Seattle's under-18 population is roughly 115,000. Even using the conservative dog number, dogs outnumber children — and SPR runs 157 playgrounds but only 14 fenced OLAs. The dedicated OLA budget line in 2018 was about $106,000 out of a $168M SPR total: roughly 0.06%. In terms of land, OLAs occupy about 26 of Seattle's ~53,100 acres — roughly 0.05% of the city, about one twentieth of one percent. Prioritizing kids is right. Arriving at 0.06% for a population the size of all dog owners is how we ended up with the current situation. That is what this principle argues should be fixed.
This is non-negotiable, and every dog owner I respect accepts it. Kids who are afraid of dogs, adults who don't want a strange dog in their face, picnickers, joggers, runners, people using the park for a dozen other reasons — none of them signed up to share space with an unfamiliar off-leash dog. The status quo, where ~40% of dog owners self-report monthly-or-more illegal off-leash use in general parks, fails these residents directly. The fix must protect their use of parks at least as well as the current system pretends to.
A playfield with dog feces on it, or a baseball diamond where someone's loose dog just ran through left field, is a failure of the system on every axis. This isn't a dog-vs-kid argument — both groups deserve protected recreational space. The current policy does not actually deliver clean playfields; enforcement happens at the margins, after the fact, with no cleanup component.
Access goes both ways. Right now, dog owners have a few tiny, often-unsafe OLAs; non-owners have a city full of parks that are technically dog-free but in practice aren't. Both groups lose. A well-designed policy guarantees protected time windows for each use.
In 2014, the Seattle City Council asked SPR to rethink off-leash policy. SPR ran over a year of surveys and in-person interviews with dog owners, parents, COLA, and neighborhood groups. The consistent feedback: the pre-2014 policy was unworkable, enforcement was structurally insufficient, and several cities had already adopted shared-use or time-zoned models that could be studied. The resulting People, Dogs and Parks Strategic Plan kept the same framework, added two full-time animal-control officers, and declined to pilot any time-zoned shared-use approach. Seattle Magazine covered this at the time. In the years since, the OLA count has not meaningfully moved and illegal off-leash use has, if anything, grown with the dog population.
And yet in April 2026, Axios Seattle reported that SPR and the Seattle Animal Shelter are expanding enforcement capacity again — moving the current single officer (Wednesday–Saturday) to two full-time seven-day positions plus backup support, on top of roughly 26 park rangers patrolling more than 460 parks. SPR's stated framing: "it's not a crackdown, officials say — but more boots on the ground are coming." That is the same lever, pulled harder. Our enforcement data already shows what this lever produces at scale: 4,803 citations over six years, roughly 90% of them first-offense warnings at $0 or $54, against a dog population of at least 150,000. Adding a second officer and a weekend tour does not change the structural math of 0.5% annual enforcement probability per dog.
It does, however, cost real money — and now we know exactly how much. The 2021 signed MOA between SPR and the Seattle Animal Shelter (reference AG21-PRF03-032) lays it out in Attachment A: one Animal Control Officer II is billed to SPR at $43.07 per hour plus 45% benefits overhead = $62.45 per hour × 2,088 hours = $130,398.73 per year in personnel, plus $3,000 in supplies and $19,000 in divisional overhead, for a total of $152,398.73 per year. That is the FAS-side cost only; the SPR-side Facilities Maintenance Worker who patrols with the ACO as a paired team is on SPR's books separately. Both are paired half-time with each other, four days per week — roughly 160 officer-hours per month to cover 485+ parks and 6,414 acres.
Scaling the 2021 numbers forward for wage growth and the April 2026 expansion from 1 ACO II (Wed–Sat) to 2 ACO II seven-day plus backup, the combined program — ACO + FMW paired teams, vehicles, supplies, and overhead — lands plausibly in the range of $700,000 to $1 million per year. (See sources/aco-moa-2016.md for the math step-by-step.) That is a meaningful sum directed at a lever that — by the site's own enforcement analysis — produces 0.5% annual contact probability per dog and 90%-warning outcomes. The same half-million to million dollars, redirected to a clean-park compliance model (time-zoned shared use plus post-session cleanup staff, per the recommendation below), would fund a far larger ground presence at the moments when parks actually need it. This is precisely the outcome the 2014–2017 process warned against — and the cost makes the misdirection more legible, not less.
The numbers: 4,803 off-leash citations issued between January 2014 and October 2019 against a dog population of at minimum 150,000. That's on the order of a 0.5% chance per dog per year of being cited, before accounting for repeat offenders (who represent the small tail, not the bulk). Of the 4,803 citations, roughly 90% were first-offense warnings at $0 or $54. A 2nd offense is $109; a 3rd is $136; a 4th+ is $162. The practical ceiling is about $162, and even the Seattle Municipal Code's $150 maximum is easily absorbed by higher-income owners as a de-facto access fee. Raising fines higher runs into a regressive-enforcement problem: the same $500 fine that's meaningful to a lower-income dog owner is a rounding error to a wealthy one. The fine-based enforcement model is structurally mismatched to the behavior. Seattle Municipal Code 18.12.080(A) is the cited violation.
People break the law here because the alternative is worse:
This is a supply failure producing a compliance failure, exactly as predictable economics would suggest. No amount of enforcement addresses the underlying cause.
Before the rest of this page argues its recommendation, it should say out loud the best arguments against it. These are drawn from a 147-comment April 2021 Nextdoor thread about Queen Anne Playfield where neighbors on both sides engaged substantively. Every argument below was made by a real neighbor, not a strawman. Where the counterargument is correct, I say so.
This is correct. SMC 18.12.080 is unambiguous. SPR signage is unambiguous. Athletic playfields are dedicated to organized play. When dog owners off-leash their dogs on a marked playfield during a softball practice, they are breaking the law and interfering with the park's intended use. My argument on this page is not that individual rule-breaking is justified — it's that the rule has failed at the system level, and the system needs policy change, not more individual rule-breaking. The opinion page's recommendation is addressed to the City, not a defense of what people already do.
Agreed in the narrow sense — and the wrong frame for a policy question. Dog ownership is discretionary. It is also mainstream: SPR's own 2016 survey found roughly 25% of Seattle residents use OLAs, and widely cited estimates put Seattle's dog population at more than its under-18 population. When a city allocates 0.06% of its parks budget to a population that large, the question isn't whether dog ownership is a "right" — it's whether the allocation matches the constituency. It doesn't. That's the policy argument, not a rights claim.
Confirmed. Multiple times, by non-advocates, at the same park. In the thread referenced above, one neighbor documented a small off-leash dog running at an 8-year-old's feet at Big Howe. Another described a flag football game at Queen Anne Playfield being paused multiple times because a single off-leash dog kept running into play. A softball parent described her daughter's practice where "every practice the girls are stepping in dog poop." These are real, and they strengthen — not weaken — the argument for a structured shared-use model over the current shadow-enforcement status quo. The current regime produces these incidents despite the law, because enforcement is structurally insufficient. A time-zoned access model with dedicated cleanup staff (the Recommendation below) directly addresses each of these incidents by reserving prime athletic hours for athletic use and pairing the off-leash window with visible compliance staff.
Correct. And the site doesn't argue otherwise — I want to say that explicitly. "More dogs than children" is a scale indicator that shows dog ownership is mainstream in Seattle, not a prescription that dog-park spending should match playground spending per capita. The opinion here is narrower: SPR's OLA allocation (0.06% of its budget for a population that's 25%+ of residents) is an order-of-magnitude mismatch with any reasonable allocation principle, not that 25% of the parks budget should go to OLAs.
Yes, and yes. This argument appears in both the thread and in Principle P2. Don Harper, the Queen Anne Community Council Parks Chair, has spent 20+ years working on this problem — and described several attempted sites (MacLean Park, David Rogers Park, Smith Cove) that were rejected by SPR, or by adjacent neighbors, or by funding-source restrictions. That's why the site's recommendation is not "build a lot more OLAs." It's a time-zoned shared-use policy on parks the city already owns.
The first sentence is completely fair. A parent watching softball practice at Queen Anne Playfield did not personally set SPR's OLA allocation. Taking frustration out on them is both wrong and counterproductive. The argument I want to make in this editorial is only with the City — which is also the body that can change the policy. The second sentence is the interesting one: "Don't break the law, lobby for change." I'd argue these are not mutually exclusive. People have lobbied for change; COLA has lobbied; the QACC Parks Chair has spent two decades lobbying. The city's answer has been to expand enforcement of a failing law rather than reexamine the law. At some point "lobby harder" stops being a serious response.
Fair and concrete. If the city can't enforce "no dogs ever on athletic fields," why would it enforce "no dogs on athletic fields from 9am to 9pm"? Two answers. First, the shape of the rule is different: a time-bounded window is something an owner can plan around, which the current blanket rule is not. Second, the Recommendation specifically redirects the enforcement budget away from citations and toward on-site compliance monitoring at the transition hours and post-session cleanup. You can't enforce every park every minute of every day. You can enforce a handful of designated parks at two specific transition points per day — that's tractable, and it's what New York City has done for 20+ years. It is not a new idea. The existing Seattle model is.
SPR's 2017 People, Dogs and Parks Strategic Plan defends current coverage with an access claim that, once examined, is the clearest evidence of the framework's failure: that most Seattle residents live within 2.5 miles of an OLA. The Green Lake loop is 2.8 miles. SPR is effectively arguing that walking the Green Lake loop one-way to reach your dog park — and then walking it back — constitutes reasonable access.
By comparison, Trust for Public Land's industry-standard metric — the same metric SPR happily cites when noting that 99% of Seattleites live within a 10-minute walk of a park — is 0.5 miles. SPR uses the tighter standard to celebrate Seattle's park system generally, and a standard 5× more permissive to paper over the OLA-specific failure. That asymmetry alone is the argument.
Given the principles and the evidence: the realistic path forward is not to keep building small fenced OLAs. It is to change the policy about how dogs and people share the parks Seattle already has.
Adopt a shared-use model similar to New York City's long-standing off-leash hours policy — early morning and evening windows in designated parks during which dogs may be off-leash under owner control, with the rest of the day reserved for traditional park use. Pair it with a fundamentally different enforcement posture focused on shared-use compliance, not leash-law violations.
This approach was raised during the 2014–2017 SPR process, was supported by COLA and multiple participating community members, and was set aside by SPR as too hard to enforce. The data this site has assembled suggests the current approach is also too hard to enforce — at 4,803 citations over six years against 150,000+ dogs. If we are going to have a policy that is difficult to enforce either way, we should pick the one that could actually work if we did.
This editorial argues that Seattle has failed at the OLA question. It has not failed because nobody tried. Many people have spent years — some decades — working on this problem, inside and outside city government, and have been stymied by constraints no individual advocate can solve on their own. It's worth naming a few of them.
Twenty-plus years of persistent OLA advocacy in Queen Anne. Secured funding in the 2008 Pro Parks & Green Spaces Levy for two new OLAs — Kinnear and Magnolia Manor. Worked on the Smith Cove site that was originally designed at 55,000 sq ft and was reduced by SPR to 25,000 sq ft three months later without notice. Attempted sites at MacLean Park (blocked by funding-source restrictions), David Rogers Park (blocked by neighborhood pushback). Still at it. See the 2021 thread summarized in sources/nextdoor-qa-playfield-2021.md.
The 501(c)(3) that has organized volunteer advocates, maintained biennial OLA surveys and inventory data, and participated in every major SPR planning process since well before the 2014 People, Dogs and Parks Strategic Plan. The usability data on Part II (lighting, water, small-dog areas, residents' regularly-used sites) is COLA's work. Every advocate who comes to this issue fresh builds on theirs.
Twenty-plus years of volunteer stewardship that made Magnuson the functional model of what a neighborhood-governed OLA can be: programming, fundraising, infrastructure upkeep, community coordination. Magnuson is the counterexample to "Seattle can't do OLAs well" — it's what happens when a community owns the outcome. The recommendation on this page borrows explicitly from the MOLG model on the community-governance side.
This editorial is critical of SPR's policy choices, but should be read alongside the acknowledgment that SPR has been asked to do a genuinely impossible job. Seattle is among the densest, most land-constrained major U.S. cities. Park parcels big enough for a real OLA cost tens of millions of dollars when they can be found at all. SPR has to simultaneously balance the needs of kids, athletic-league users, non-dog park users, dog owners, wildlife, environmental remediation, and a housing-and-homelessness emergency that puts pressure on every square foot of public land. The 2014–2017 People, Dogs and Parks process was sincere and the staff who ran it worked hard. The criticism in this editorial is that the resulting plan repeated the pre-2014 framework rather than piloting a shared-use alternative — and now, a decade later, is repeating it again with expanded enforcement. Not accusatory; factual. The problem is that the same approach has failed twice and it's time to try something new. SPR is the right partner to run that pilot.
Then-candidate and later Councilmember Andrew Lewis (District 7, 2019–2023) was the most visible elected voice on this issue during his time in office. Other council members have moved seats since 2019 but multiple offices have received data packets from community advocates. If you're a current council member or staffer, see the PRR and outreach directory — these are the questions we're asking SPR and what we're asking to see the answers to.
Every dog owner who has driven out of their way to reach a real OLA rather than off-leashing at the neighborhood playfield. Every parent who has nonetheless kept bringing their kid to that playfield. Every softball coach who's still running practice on a field that sometimes has dog feces on it. The status quo is a tax everyone pays, and it doesn't have to stay that way.
This page is opinion. The principles, opinions, and recommendation above are mine. The data claims underneath them link back to the factual pages of this site, to public records, or to published primary sources. Where I don't have a citable source, I've flagged it as a data gap rather than asserted it as fact.
Relationship to the 2014–2017 SPR process. I participated in the People, Dogs and Parks Strategic Plan live interviews as a community member. I am not and never have been an SPR employee, a COLA board member, or an elected official. My views are personal.
On the "more dogs than children" figure. I've used the conservative 150,000-dog floor (Seattle Humane, Cascade PBS) throughout, not the higher estimates found in community discussion or in SPR's own 2023 Expansion Study. Updating to a rigorously sourced current count is on the site's to-do list.