From dawn until dusk, the newly revamped Laguna Lake off-leash dog park is now open to the public in San Luis Obispo.
“This is so overdue, you know," said Bob Jones, San Luis Obispo County resident.
For 25 years, the Laguna Lake Dog Park was unfenced, but now it has reopened after a 6-month-long renovation.
“I've been coming here for 20 years," said San Luis Obispo resident Cassie Tarantino. "We were kind of used to what we had and if it's not broke, don't fix it. But this is really beautiful.”
The $1.3 million project included upgrades like a fenced-in small and large dog area totaling three acres, the biggest in the county.
“It's great, the fact that we can go off leash because she's not real great at coming back,” Jones said about his dog, jokingly.
The renovations include updated ADA pathways, new play structures for the dogs and upgraded turf areas, mulch, and improved drainage.
“It was important that we had this footprint," SLO City Parks and Recreation Director Greg Avakian said. "We didn't want to make it smaller, we wanted to make it safer and then more inclusive and accessible.”
Ahead of this project, Avakian explained the city did a survey that yielded more than 600 responses and the result is a compilation of changes the parks and recreation staff needed to put into place but also ones the community wanted.
“As it dried, it created these huge cracks," Tarantino recalled of the old park that used to have poor drainage. "It was just tripping hazards everywhere.”
“We really kind of fit between what we needed to do for liability and risk, but also still have an enjoyable large park area that kind of still had the same ambiance that there was here before," Avakian stated.
Local groups like the Friends of SLO City Dog Parks got involved, while the Pacific High School construction students provided the play structures, spending a whole year creating the two sets for both the small and large dog areas.
“I hope that everybody in the community gets to enjoy them," construction teacher Dana McClish said. "It's been really good for the students to build something like this that they get to see in their community.”
Avakian said the next installment at the dog park will be shading areas within the next year, as well as the addition of trees and memorial benches.
